Hugo Drochon

Forty years on, Theda Skocpol’s account of the French Revolution remains remarkably robust. But how are we to think about political change today? Since Louis XVI walked up to the guillotine, we have been used to thinking of a left/right opposition driving political change, but this was not the only division at the time, nor indeed since: during the Terror, Robespierre was supported by the Montagnards, the deputies who sat on the highest benches of the Assembly, while the opposition was located at the bottom, in the Marais or the Plain. Like during la Terreur, today’s politics, from France to the United States, appears more to oppose a centre to an extreme, and this prism allows us to track Skocpol’s own evolution since 1979, from periphery to centre.

In his seminal 1994 book Left and Right, Bobbio defined the left as favouring equality, whereas the right favoured inequality. Whilst that distinction retains all of its intellectual purchase, Bobbio was also open to theorizing the centre as either the ‘included’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘transversal’ middle. Building on Bobbio’s work, this article posits that a centre/extremes opposition is a better way of conceptualizing political change, after which a left/right divide re-establishes itself on the basis of the creation of a new centre. To do so it will explore the birthplace of the left/right divide, namely the French Revolution, to argue it was not the only – or indeed dominant – opposition at the time, turning then to the 2017 French presidential election, which opposed Emmanuel Macron to Marine Le Pen, to underline how the centre/extremes opposition continues to capture something fundamental about our contemporary politics. It will conclude by asking whether Bobbio’s notion of the ‘inclusive’ middle is the best way for the centre to hold today.

A sizable literature tracing back to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style (1964) argues that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than Democrats and liberals. However, the evidence for this proposition is mixed. Since conspiracy theory beliefs are associated with dangerous orientations and behaviors, it is imperative that social scientists better understand the connection between conspiracy theories and political orientations. Employing 20 surveys of Americans from 2012 to 2021 (total n = 37,776), as well as surveys of 20 additional countries spanning six continents (total n = 26,416), we undertake an expansive investigation of the asymmetry thesis. First, we examine the relationship between beliefs in 52 conspiracy theories and both partisanship and ideology in the U.S.; this analysis is buttressed by an examination of beliefs in 11 conspiracy theories across 20 more countries. In our second test, we hold constant the content of the conspiracy theories investigated—manipulating only the partisanship of the theorized villains—to decipher whether those on the left or right are more likely to accuse political out-groups of conspiring. Finally, we inspect correlations between political orientations and the general predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories over the span of a decade. In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers and the socio-political context in which those ideas are considered.

‘One man, one vote’ is a longstanding democratic battle-cry, but it has come under increasing scrutiny of late, and not simply because of its gendered language. If gender equality, at least at the ...

In the pantheon of liberal political thought, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, with its defence of freedom of thought, conscience, speech and private property, takes pride of place. So why did Mill c...

Polls asking respondents about their beliefs in conspiracy theories have become increasingly commonplace. However, researchers have expressed concern about the willingness of respondents to divulge beliefs in conspiracy theories due to the stigmatization of those ideas. We use an experimental design similar to a list experiment to decipher the effect of social desirability bias on survey responses to eight conspiratorial statements. Our study includes 8290 respondents across seven countries, allowing for the examination of social desirability bias across various political and cultural contexts. While the proportion of individuals expressing belief in each statement varies across countries, we observe identical treatment effects: respondents systematically underreport conspiracy beliefs. These findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs may be more prominent than current estimates suggest.

In an increasingly crowded field, Nadia Urbinati’s study of populism stands out by being anchored in a profound theory of democracy, namely the notion of disfigured democracy she had elaborated in ...