How conspiracies rise, pread and fall: the case of voter fraud, the blogosphere and the 2004 election

"The idea that public opinion is fundamentally top-down and elite-driven is virtually
orthodoxy among contemporary political science researchers. Support for conspiracy theories, however, pose a fundamental challenge to this prevailing view because the dynamics of mass opinion here are, prima facie, likely not to be a top-down or elite-driven process. In order to test the hypothesis that conspiratorial thinking is the result of anti-elite, bottom-up opinion dynamics rather than the result of elite-driven, top-down opinion dynamics, this paper tracks blog discussion of election related conspiracy theories during the four week period from November 2 to November 30, 2004. Using a computer assisted, quantitative content analysis of 16 randomly selected A-list political blogs and 147 randomly selected, less popular political blogs, I find strong support for the idea that conspiracy theories are the result of bottom-up, anti-elite opinion dynamics." Source: Institute of Governmental Studies. U.C. Berkeley

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