Stockemer, Daniel and Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau 2025: Conspiracy Theories and their Believers. A Comparative Outlook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781009570817, 98 pp., 21.01 € (Paperback).

Conspiracy theories are ubiquitous in political life nowadays.Not only are they drivers of radicalised splinter groups, but they are well salient in public opinion as well as in government politics.Think about Covid-19 conspiracy theories spreading over time or about the global rise of the Q-Anon movement; think not only of various of those theories spread by the 45th and 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump, but also of the narratives propagated by Javier Milei about cultural Marxism in Argentina or Viktor Orbn's anti-Soros and anti-immigration campaigns in Hungary.Recent data from ten European countries show that almost a third of those surveyed in a representative sample belief in either one conspiracy narrative about either Covid-19 or immigration (Herold 2024).The new Cambridge Element by Daniel Stockemer and Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau, both from the University of Ottawa, gives a deeper insight in recent research on conspiracism, particularly from-but not limited to-the perspective of comparative public opinion.Stockemer and Bordeleau state in the preface of their text, that the recent focus on researching the demand side of conspiracism is quite US-centred (3).They therefore set their comparative perspective on four Western cases (including the US) and four non-Western cases.These are the United States, Australia, Canada, and Germany-and Brazil, Lebanon, Morocco, and South Africa.The Element sets itself a quite ambitious goal to answer five research questions.While the first three-on main conspiracy narratives per country as well as their prevalence and on the demographic of conspiracy theorists-are quite interesting, they seem more a preface to the more interesting comparative questions arising out of them: "How does the typical conspiracy believer differ across contexts?"and "[d]o the same factors explain beliefs in distinct conspiracy theories?",Stocker and