Rumors, Propaganda, and Conspiracies: New Insights on the Ideological Dimensions of Democratic Backsliding and Autocratization

hich factors help to explain the global tide in democratic backsliding and autocratization?What sustains these trends, and can they be countered?For a long time, scholarship focused on formal governing institutions in dictatorships and authoritarians' modes of repression and control.Yet recent worksfeatured in this issue-also stress the importance of ideational factors, including the information environment.They discuss how rumors, propaganda, and conspiracies may prop up strongmen, returning scholarly attention to long-standing issues of ideology and legitimacy.According to Kevin J. Elliott, it is citizens' busyness that limits their ability to closely follow political news, make sense of contrasting ideas and information, and recognize possible misinformation.In Democracy for Busy People (2023), he highlights the many temporal factors that prevent people from becoming informed and exercising democratic citizenship.Elliott calls this busyness the "currency of disadvantage," which he argues should feature center stage in any discussion on the quality of democracy and how to strengthen it.The result is widespread citizen apathy and political instability, including the rise of authoritarians (see Taylor's review in this issue).And yet, even in countries where citizens are engaged, democratic governance has come under threat and populists are in the ascendant globally.As David Art points out in a book review essay in this issue, 20 years ago about eighty million people lived under democracy governed by right-wing populists; by 2020 that figure had reached a staggering 2.5 billion.Alongside the rise of populists in democracies, the number of dictatorships is surging globally: nowadays, about three in four people live under nondemocratic rule (Papada et al. 2023), and most coups by authoritarians are carried out in democracies, not in preexisting dictatorships (Geddes 2024).This review issue draws attention to the ideological dimension of illiberal politics, including to issues of rumors, propaganda, and conspiracies; how they relate; and their consequences.