DISTRUST · Dealing With Distrust: How Public Organizations Respond To Conspiracy Theories.

How do public organizations respond to rising levels of popular distrust fueled by conspiracy theories? Many European citizens no longer trust their own societal institutions to work for the public good, but imagine those to be governed by a shadowy cabal with nefarious motives. While there is much research on conspiracy theories, there is little, if any, academic knowledge on how these institutions deal with rising levels of conspiratorial distrust. This clear knowledge gap is all the more surprising given that conspiracy theories are generally seen as a threat to the authority, legitimacy and functioning of these institutions and to democratic societies as a whole.DISTRUST therefore opens up that question to sociological scrutiny. Firmly grounded in institutional and organizational sociological theory, this research project’s prime objective is to understand how public organizations deal with conspiratorial distrust. It advances three main research questions: 1) how do public organizations conceive of conspiracy theories as a challenge to their operations? 2) how do they empirically react (and have reacted) to these forms of distrust? 3) how can we explain these reactions following organizational sociological theory? This project studies four key societal institutions (media, government, science, and education) in three conceptually opposed European countries (The Netherlands, Italy, and Poland), and on the supranational level. It deploys various qualitative research methods (archival studies, critical policy analysis, interviews and participant observation). As such, it provides both comprehensive research of different public organizations, as well as comparative understandings across institutions and countries. To make this knowledge more robust and societally relevant, the last phase of this project deploys participatory research with professionals working at these organizations to reflect on their actions and their (unanticipated) consequences