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Waseda University released the eighth and final episode of the first installment of its English language podcase series “Rigorous Research, Real Impact” on February 18, 2025. The episode is titled “Unlocking the Rise of Conspiracy Movements in Japan”. All podcast episodes are available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

Episode 8: “Unlocking the Rise of Conspiracy Movements in Japan”

In this final episode of the first installment of the series, Assistant Professor Robert Fahey (Waseda Institute for Advanced Study) serves as the guest and talks candidly with his Research Assistant Romeo Marcantuoni (Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies) about their joint research project examining the rise of Japan’s Sanseito party, which was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their conversation explores the interplay between conspiracy beliefs, the increasingly complex information environment, populist movements, and the broader political system in Japan and beyond.

Link to their discussion paper “From conspiracy theory movement to challenger party: The case of Japan’s Sanseito“: https://www.waseda.jp/inst/wias/assets/uploads/2025/01/dp2024001.pdf

“Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact”

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About the Series:

Waseda University’s first ever English-language academic podcast titled “Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact” is an 8-episode series broadly showcasing the diverse work of our renowned social sciences and humanities researchers. In each of the short 15-45 minute episodes we welcome a knowledgeable researcher to casually converse with an MC about their recent, rigorously conducted research, the positive impact it has on society, and their thoughts on working in Japan at Waseda. It is a perfect choice for listeners with a strong desire to learn, including current university students considering graduate school, researchers looking for their next collaborative project, or even those considering working for a university that stresses the importance of interdisciplinary approaches. 

About the Guests: 

Guest Assistant Professor Robert A. Fahey:

Dr. Robert A. Fahey is an assistant professor of political science at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include populism, polarisation, the effects of conspiracy theory belief, and Japanese politics. He is currently working on a series of large-scale surveys aimed at discovering what kinds of conspiracy beliefs are widespread in East Asian countries, and how those beliefs impact the political and social life of those nations.

MC Ph.D. Candidate Romeo Marcantuoni:

Romeo Marcantuoni is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University. He earned his MA and BA in Japanese Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. His research centers on Japan’s progressive parties.

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Transcript: 

MC Romeo Marcantuoni  (00:05):

Hello and welcome to Waseda University’s English podcast series titled “Rigorous Research, Real Impact.” In this series, we dive into interesting conversations and stories from Waseda’s vibrant academic and cultural community.

My name is Romeo Marcantuoni. I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, and today we’re turning the tables on our usual host, Robert Fahey. Dr. Fahey is an Assistant Professor with the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study with a Ph.D. in Political Science from Waseda University. Dr. Fahey specializes in the study of populism, political polarization, and the effects of conspiracy theory belief. His research delves into contemporary political dynamics, focusing on the intersection of social polarization, Japanese politics, and how conspiracy theories influence political and social life.

 Dr. Fahey’s expertise includes quantitative analysis, political text analysis, and network analysis, and his work has been published in journals such as Political Studies and PLOS ONE. Additionally, he has presented his findings at numerous prestigious conferences, including the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Fahey and I are actually collaborating on a project which is what we will be discussing today. I will be asking Dr. Fahey about a presentation that we recently gave at the ECPR General Conference titled “From conspiracy theory movement to challenger party: why the case of Japan’s Sanseito isn’t more widely replicated.” So today we will look at the rise of Japan’s Sanseito Party, which was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll also explore the interplay between conspiracy beliefs, populist movements, and the broader political system in Japan and beyond.

 So, before we move on to talking about all of those things, could you first tell us a bit more about your journey? What inspired you to explore the world of Japanese politics?

Guest Assistant Professor Robert Fahey (01:53):

Certainly, yeah. First of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. It’s a little unusual to be on this side of the table. In terms of my journey into academia and what led me into researching Japanese politics and politics more broadly, I think it’s a little unusual among academics because I actually started out as a journalist. I worked as a journalist first in Ireland and then in the UK from a pretty young age. I started working professionally at 16 and I didn’t actually go to university until I was in my late 20s. By that stage, I was working as a business journalist and I was focused on the global video game industry and because of that I thought, “oh, learning Japanese is going to be a really great way to boost my career.” Because I had conducted so many interviews via translators which didn’t necessarily go great because translators are a real barrier to conversation.

So, I enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, studied Japanese there, and that is the reason why I was in Japan. I was on a year abroad in Nagoya when the earthquake happened in Tohoku in March of 2011. And that was an incredible opportunity to see firsthand how a very resilient society deals with an incredible crisis. And it’s a kind of crisis that we generally don’t experience in Europe. And there are so many facets to that sort of crisis. There is the logistical aspect of it, the simple question of how you restore supply chains, how do you keep order, how do you keep people from panicking? And the part that really fascinated me was the information side of it. Probably because I came from a journalistic background.

In the English language media, there was a lot of misinformation spread very quickly. The Japanese language side was better. But even at that, and especially across social media, which was really becoming influential at that time, there was a lot of misinformation being spread. A lot of people believed some very false things and perhaps made some very bad decisions as a result of that. That fascinated me that you could have a society that is so resilient to disaster in some ways, but that felt like it had a blind spot in its information environment and in ensuring that people were getting accurate information.

What I mean by information environment is really the sum total of all of the different sources of information that we have. So, it could be television, it could be newspapers, it could be books, it could even be advertising around you. But increasingly your information environment is social media. It’s the bubble of information that you live inside that mostly comes from social media. It comes from websites; it comes from streaming sites.

And so, I had always intended to go back to being a journalist, and instead I came here to do a master’s in political science to learn more about this, to try to look into this more. And 14 years later, I am still here and still looking for answers to questions about the information environment and to the kind of damage and the problems that are emerging from that sphere. Because it’s very much a moving target and every time we figure out something about it, some new fresh hell is visited upon us, and we find some more problems emerging.

MC Romeo (04:52):

Thank you very much, Dr. Fahey. That was really interesting. Can I ask you now, what key areas of political science do you focus on now? And how can your findings contribute to our understanding of political beliefs and behaviors in the current global context?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (05:06):

Well, in terms of the areas of political science that I look at, it all draws upon that idea about the information environment, and particularly about threats to democracy and to society that have emerged from changes to our information environment. We all know that we are living in a much more fragmented information environment than we used to.

 I tell my students sometimes, and I get wide saucer eyes, that when I was growing up, there were two television channels and the rich kids across the road had a satellite dish and they could get ten. And those were our only sources of information, really. And I’m not that old. So, this has been a relatively short space of time in which we’ve gone from two television channels to any number of different YouTube channels and TikTok channels and reels and whatever it is that you’re looking at on the Internet, plus hundreds of television channels.

 So, the fragmentation of potential information sources is something that our society has had happen to it in a very short space of time. And we haven’t really figured out how to deal with the effects of that or even quite what the effects of that have been. We know that from that we have a rise of misinformation. We know that it has also driven polarization because people can live in totally separate information environments from each other.

You and the person next to you may have a completely different, not only set of beliefs, but set of assumed facts about the world based on what media sources you are accessing. And that creates cracks in society. And into those cracks, we get populist politicians, we get conspiracy theorists, we get all sorts of people attempting to exploit these new opportunities that exist for them because of the way that information has become so fragmented around it.

And so, this is really important within the broad field of political science because it touches almost everything that we do. As I say, my interest in it was sparked by thinking about disaster resilience. But we’re sitting here recording this on the day after the second Trump inauguration in the United States, and of course, you can see the effects of the information environment on how that has come about as well. So, really, across the board, across political science, we have to think about where people get their information and the effects that it has on them.

MC Romeo (07:10):

And so, your research highlights the intersection of conspiracy theories and politics. You just mentioned it’s the day after Trump’s inauguration, and a lot of that political movement can be seen to be rooted in some sort of conspiracy beliefs.

Guest Prof. Fahey  (07:23):

Trump himself first came to prominence as a conspiracy theorist. He came to prominence as a businessperson, but within the political sphere, he came to prominence as a birther conspiracy theorist, someone who promoted the idea that Barack Obama was not a legitimate president because he hadn’t been born in America, or that was their claim. So, this is somebody who was a conspiracy theorist from day one in his political career.

MC Romeo (07:45):

So, you’ve mentioned conspiracy theories a few times now. Could you walk us through what conspiracy theories are and how they matter?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (07:54):

So, when it comes to defining conspiracy theories, which is important to do because we know that there are real conspiracies in the world. There are crimes, conspiracy to commit such and such. So, people do conspire, and sometimes governments conspire. We know that there have been situations where governments have concealed information. They do that quite often. We know that there are situations where governments have done things that are not legal, and therefore there are conspiracies out there in the world.

However, when we’re thinking about conspiracy theory beliefs and the types of beliefs that we think have a really negative impact, it’s not just about some kind of healthy degree of suspicion or a healthy degree of cynicism about the authorities and about governments. It’s really about having a view or a belief that major world events, whether they’re current or historical, have been secretly orchestrated by some powerful group for their own nefarious purposes. And a core aspect of that is that it involves rejection of the conventional narrative about why it happened.

So it’s people saying, look, there is a historical narrative. There is a conventional narrative for why a certain thing has happened out there in the world. But I have esoteric information. I have information you don’t have access to or that you don’t believe or whatever that tells me that actually this was some secret group that planned and plotted this for their own evil purposes.

That’s what a conspiracy theory is. And a key part of it is how we sort of draw a line between conspiracies that are just someone saying, “actually, I think the government might be telling porkies,” versus someone saying, “I think that the moon landing was faked or whatever it is often to look at the number of people who would be involved.”

 So, there’s some really good research that has been done that shows how hard it is to keep a secret. The average human being is very hard at keeping a secret. Two human beings are really, really bad at keeping secrets. And as you add more individuals into the group that knows the secret, you exponentially increase the likelihood that that information gets leaked. So, the likelihood of how long you would be able to keep a secret that thousands of people are privy to is measured in seconds.

MC Romeo (10:11):

In that case, what initially drew you to this area of study. And what role do you think conspiracy theory belief plays in shaping political movements and parties, especially now in the post COVID-19 era?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (10:21):

Conspiracy theories actually started out as almost a side interest, but myself and some other researchers here at Waseda and at other universities were doing some work on populism specifically and about polarization within society. And we were looking at European countries and at Japan. We were trying to really include Japan and East Asia into the global conversation about populism.

And one of the things that I kept coming back to was that there always seemed to be some aspect of conspiracy belief at the root of what was going on. And so that’s where my fascination with it started. And when I first started studying conspiracy beliefs, there was a tendency for people to be, “well, this is kind of a silly side project.” “I’m sure it’s fun.” “Conspiracy theories are interesting.” And then the pandemic happened, and January 6^th happened, and people stopped asking why this was worth studying.

I saw somebody say on BlueSky they’re in a field of political science in which there is perfect overlap between the things that are really good for their research and the things that are really bad for their lives and for society in general. And I felt that very deeply because it’s been great for my research that conspiracy theories have become so prominent. But it’s certainly not been good for the world. And that’s been really, really evident since the pandemic. In terms of the information environment, in terms of what we think about authority, in terms of information, what is an authoritative source in terms of our beliefs about society and the world. The pandemic has broken some things, and I think we still haven’t quite figured out where the fault lines are and what parts have shattered. So that’s really what researching conspiracy beliefs and researching their effects is about to me.

MC Romeo (11:54):

So, what we mostly are doing is focusing on Japan for this project, in particular. In the case of Japan, mainstream parties like the Liberal Democratic Party–they tend to avoid adopting conspiracy rhetoric even in politically charged times. For example, just now, after the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Why do you think these parties refrain from such associations and what are the risks they seek to avoid?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (12:16):

This has been our understanding for a really long time, that conspiracy theories were something that happened at the fringes of politics. And in Japan, that’s still broadly the case. We do see cases in other countries, and we just mentioned Trump and the Republicans in the United States. We do see cases where conspiracy theories and beliefs are being more adopted by mainstream parties. But yeah, in Japan, you don’t really see the LDP embracing conspiracy theories, nor do you see the mainstream opposition parties embracing them or using them in their rhetoric.

There are a few reasons for that. One of them is that conspiracy theories fundamentally undermine the credibility of authorities. Conspiracy theories are all about people in authority lying to you and withholding the truth from you. And if you are the Liberal Democratic Party, you have mostly been in authority since the end of the Second World War. So realistically, you don’t want to undermine the perception that people have of authority, because that’s you. There’s also simply the fact that for the most part, up until relatively recently, there was what we think of as like a cordon sanitaire, like a cordon around conspiracy theory actors.

So, if you came out in the public sphere and you started promoting conspiracy theories, the media wouldn’t touch you, other politicians wouldn’t touch you, mainstream voters would be turned off from you. And there was just this kind of immune system response that society had to conspiracy theory promoters. We were just like, “okay, no, you do not belong at the heart of public conversation and public discourses because what you’re spreading is dangerous and really undermines our society.”

 That is still there for the most part in Japan and in many other societies. But it is certainly weakened. It has certainly gone away to some extent. So, there’s a strategic consideration. You know, there may be some constituency of conspiracy theorists you could appeal to, but the damage that that could do to your party as a mainstream party is significant.

 Having said that, mainstream parties in Japan don’t embrace conspiracy theories, but they’re also kind of shy about rejecting them, about being really robust in rejecting them. And I think part of the problem is that they tend to treat conspiracy theories as being some kind of a silly, inconsequential thing. Oh, this person believes in aliens, this person believes the moon landing was faked, whatever it is. And they don’t see that as being relevant to day-to-day politics.

So, you see, I think we were talking quite recently about the example where the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party, essentially said, “oh, even if a member has conspiracy theory beliefs, we wouldn’t see that as being their promotion of those beliefs. We wouldn’t see as being cause for disciplining them.” Which in a post-pandemic world where we have seen conspiracy theories do so much damage to democracy and to public health and to social order, you really have to question if they’ve kept up with the times because it feels like having members of that party who are openly kind of freelancing on the side, doing a bit of conspiracy theory public speaking somewhere, that feels very undermining to the core values of the party. It feels like something they really need to update their views about.

MC Romeo (15:17):

Yeah, that’s very interesting. The case of this Constitutional Democratic Party member saying that it’s kind of alright for its members to have these kinds of ideas. That was about a person who did not believe in the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. One would imagine that is actually counter to what the party believes in. Counter to the policies that they have.

Guest Prof. Fahey  (15:39):

Yeah, exactly. I mean the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, like every mainstream party, supported the vaccination program, supported measures to stop the spread of the disease during the pandemic, as any reasonable political party would. But they do have this quite high-profile member who was off, like I said, just freelancing on the side and going to conferences with crazy fringe people and speaking about how he doesn’t believe in the vaccine. And the party says, “oh, that’s kind of his hobby, he’s allowed to do that.” It just feels a little bit naive. But I wonder to what extent it’s also a policy that is designed to say we don’t want to offend anybody, we don’t want to turn off anybody who might vote for us. And it prevents them from taking a robust stance on these kinds of issues.

MC Romeo (16:19):

So, those are mainstream parties. What we are looking at is mostly the behavior of more what we call “niche parties”, sometimes “challenger parties.” And one of those that we look at is called Sanseito. Could you walk us through what Sanseito is and the specific conditions that allowed it to thrive in Japan’s political system?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (16:41):

Sure. So yeah, Sanseito was the topic of the presentation we gave at ECPR last summer. This is a party that emerged during the pandemic. They really kind of emerged from the anti-vaccine and anti-masking movements that you saw in Japan during the pandemic. And to that extent, I think when they first emerged, people expected that they would just be a flash in the pan and as soon as those things were no longer a major salient issue, they’d just go away.

This is a country where little niche parties boil up and disappear very, very quickly. But instead Sanseito have kind of gone from strength to strength, not to the extent of being a major party yet, but they won a single seat in the Upper House. Then they won about 100 seats in local elections the following year. And in the general election last year they won three seats in the Lower House. So, they’ve really kind of continued to go from strength to strength even as the core issue that they were founded on, which was rejection of vaccines, has dissipated. And we’ve looked into their worldviews and their conspiracy beliefs, and it really still has that vaccination aspect at the heart of it. And it’s public health or rejection of public health measures. But they also now have a much broader conspiracy worldview that they peddled to their membership.

So that’s who Sanseito are in terms of why they have thrived. Why they have thrived in this political system. That’s sort of the puzzle because there are a number of countries where you had parties a little bit like Sanseito. So, you can think of something like dieBasis in Germany was a party that really resembled Sanseito when it emerged, but it just kind of fizzled off into nothingness. And you had similar kind of little conspiracy theory actors in a bunch of different places, especially in Europe.

If we look at Japan, there are a number of factors that I think have helped Sanseito to become successful, as well as their own agency. Right. They have also been a very good party in terms of organizing themselves and building themselves up into quite a significant force in terms of alternative media and in terms of messaging and in terms of presence in on-street campaigning, which is something a lot of parties really fail to do. The organizational stuff is very important. But in terms of Japan itself, Sanseito have really ridden the wave of a massive decline in trust in Japan. We’ve always thought of Japan as a high trust society and compared to Western societies, it pretty much is. But we have now seen a very big decline in media trust and Sanseito has been one of the beneficiaries of that. A lot of people feel that they don’t trust the mainstream media or that they don’t get the full story from the mainstream media. And unfortunately, who they turn to in order to get what they think of as the full story can be very unreliable sources.

Similarly, there’s a lack of faith in mainstream politics to produce solutions. I know we’ve both been working on Japanese politics for a long time, but even if you’re somebody who has just had casual conversations about it with people, it’s very hard to find a Japanese person who will tell you, “oh, yes, I think politicians are going to fix things.” I know that’s not a common sentiment in most countries, but certainly in Japan there’s a very, very low degree of faith that any political change or any election or any political movement is going to really fix things. And that of course opens the door to these kind of fringe actors.

The other thing is that Sanseito emerged at the time when there was a real vacuum in Japan’s right wing. So, this is after the assassination. I mean, they emerged before the assassination of Shinzo Abe, but they really came to prominence after that, where you have a vacuum on the right wing of the LDP. You have a sense from some right-wing people that the LDP has sort of been taken over by its centrists and its moderates. And so, there’s some people feeling a little bit politically homeless within that right-wing tendency.

And parties like Sanseito have also been able to capitalize on that kind of going down through the list here. But the other thing is the electoral system. It’s not a criticism of the electoral system, but Japan has a system of topping up seats through proportional representation. And that basically means that you can get into the Diet without necessarily directly winning a constituency seat. And Sanseito has never won a constituency. So, they’ve always got their seats through topping up in the local elections, where they also did reasonably well. They have a system in many places where you have say 50 seats in the local assembly and it’s a first past the post system. So, the most you’ll ever need to win of the vote to get a seat is 2%. So, this really lets small parties, niche parties, single issue candidates and so on get into those assemblies.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some people prefer to have political systems that exclude small parties. Some people say that’s kind of like leaving a wound to fester. And they then get to go to their supporters and say, look how the system excludes us and oppresses us. So, there’s an argument for letting them into Parliament and exposing them to the light of day. But certainly, we do see that it’s in countries that have this more proportional electoral system that these types of parties have done reasonably well.

MC Romeo (21:33):

Yeah. So, in our research, we kind of point out that one of the reasons for Sanseito’s rise is the vaccine denial that it espouses. But on top of that is also quite influenced by populist rhetoric and nationalistic appeals. Can you discuss a little bit about how such ideologies resonate with the Japanese public today and how they compare to similar movements in other parts of the world?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (21:56):

So, there is an interesting correspondence between conspiracy theory and nationalism. And that’s been very, very clear in the years since the pandemic. Conspiracy theories are not necessarily just creatures of the right wing. There’s lots and lots of conspiracy theories that are widely held on the left wing. And I think actually some people would probably have the perception that it’s more likely that the people on the left or the far left are going to hold conspiratorial beliefs about their governments and so on.

But what we’ve seen since the pandemic is that there’s a very strong association of conspiracy and nationalism. And in Sanseito’s messaging, which is not dissimilar from some other parties in other countries, what we see is that they present a worldview in which Japan is constantly under attack from conspiratorial forces. Depending on which version of their messaging you’re looking at, which YouTube videos you’re watching, or which books you’re reading, or whatever it may be, that could be a conspiracy that dates back into the Edo era. Most commonly they suggest that it dates from the immediate post-war era, but it’s really kind of a broad conspiracy worldview that incorporates lots and lots of different conspiracies.

But the key idea behind all of them is to suppress and hold back Japan from what they see as its rightful place in the world. And I don’t want to go into the specific details of a lot of those conspiracy theories, but that’s the kind of broad viewpoint that they espouse. And of course that’s going to feed a nationalist viewpoint. It really goes hand in glove with it. Because a core aspect of nationalism is very often a sense of aggrievement that your country has been held back from the greatness that it deserves by somebody, somebody that you don’t like. And that’s what Sanseito offers through its conspiracy worldview.

And so, there’s a very interesting confluence that we’ve talked about before where people who you would look at and sort of assume naturally belong on the left wing, the kind of crystal healing, alternative medicine type of people, and the vegans and so on, kind of people who our parents’ generation would have disparagingly called hippies. They’ve all ended up in the Sanseito camp since the pandemic. And it’s their distrust of mainstream medicine and commercialized pharmaceutical companies and so on that has somehow put them onto a slippery slope that has turned them into hard right-wing nationalists, which is an extraordinary transition and one that’s still quite hard culturally to wrap our heads around.

But that’s something that’s been very successful for them, that they’ve managed to take a group that really didn’t have a lot of correspondence with nationalism before and make them into nationalists and convince them that there is this conspiracy against Japan and Sanseito is really out there fighting the fight against that.

MC Romeo (24:35):

Beyond the political arena, how do you think such movements affect social cohesion in Japan?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (24:40):

Well, I think in general, if you have a movement which is telling people simultaneously that the country is under attack from all sorts of external enemies, real and imaginary, and that also the authorities of that country are somehow involved in that attack, or at the very least incompetent to deal with it, you have a situation in which you are very seriously affecting social cohesion. You’re telling people that nobody is to be trusted, except, of course, the messenger who is giving you this information.

This is something that preys upon people’s fears. And I think, you know, I’m not a psychologist, but from my perspective, looking at this from a political angle and from a media angle, fear is a very, very powerful motivator in the success of these parties, not just Sanseito, but of similar parties everywhere. It became so critical during the pandemic because the pandemic was something that people were genuinely fearful of for, you know, very legitimate reasons. And a lot of the disruption that we’ve seen to society during and since is because of the different ways in which people dealt with their fear. Some people rejected it. They said, “This fear isn’t real. This thing that I’m fearful of is not real.” That’s it. “The monsters under the bed are not there.” And therefore, that’s how they dealt with it. Some people kind of embraced it. Some, you know, there are lots of different forms of reaction to feeling that the world had become a much more fearful place.

Conspiracy theories and radical politics helped some people to make sense of a world that they were suddenly very afraid of. It gave them a framework. It gave them a set of beliefs that basically explained to them, here is what’s actually happening. And not only are we explaining this to you, but you now have special knowledge that other people don’t have, and that kind of makes you into a special and important person. It makes you feel powerful that you have this knowledge of how the world works very similar to how cult religions actually function with their membership as well.

So, in that sense, fear is a really, really core driver of this. And of course, if you have a movement that is relying upon people’s fear of the society around them and that is building upon that fear, that’s going to be terrible for social cohesion. It’s going to be terrible for trust within your society. We’ve talked about trust a couple of times already, and this is something that a party like Sanseito and a set of beliefs like conspiracy beliefs in general are going to be very, very corrosive of. They rely upon low trust in media, but they also corrode your trust in media because they constantly tell you you’re being lied to. They rely upon low trust in elections, but they also tell you elections are being stolen, so they erode it further. They rely upon low trust in institutions, but they tell you these institutions, they’re actually part of the great conspiracy against you and against your community. They rely upon low trust in fellow citizens, and they also undermine that even further.

There is a deeply corrosive effect of not believing that anybody in any position of power or authority is telling you the truth. And that ultimately is going to affect your view of the whole world around you. So, in terms of social cohesion, there’s a very, very deep risk here, and even if we’re talking here about a party that it only got about 3.5% of the vote, the number of people who follow their material on social media, the number of people that they reach through pamphlets and campaigning and so on, is much greater than that. And the potential damage that they can do to social cohesion is really quite significant.

MC Romeo (28:03):

As you’ve mentioned before, conspiracy beliefs are actually quite prevalent. Loads of people believe that Princess Diane is still alive, that JFK is still alive. I suppose JFK is somewhat more politically relevant, but in general, people believe a lot of things that are not necessarily going to imply that a conspiracy driven political project is going to be successful. It’s not something you can really rally people around on its own, right. If that’s the case, how are we supposed to recognize the early signs of this? And what kind of effects do you believe this has on the way democracy works?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (28:33) :

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Conspiracy beliefs are super prevalent. Lots and lots of people, in fact, the vast majority of people hold some kind of conspiracy belief. And this is something we started to realize about 25 years ago, around the time that you had the death of Princess Diana, and you had the 9/11 attacks in the United States where people started doing widespread survey research into conspiracy theories and realized, “oh, this isn’t an extreme kind of pathology. Actually, everybody believes a little bit of a conspiracy theory of some description.” And very often it’s “Elvis isn’t really dead.” And those conspiracy beliefs, as you say, don’t necessarily predict the rise of a political movement that’s going to be corrosive to social cohesion.

You’re not going to build the next great political movement off the back of people who believe that Elvis was abducted by aliens. But what we do see, though, is that there is a significant difference between conspiracy beliefs that are just kind of an interesting quirk of a person’s personality. Although, you know, to be clear, if you believe flat Earth stuff, if you believe the Roswell alien stuff, if you believe the moon landings were faked, you are still kind of saying, I think a very wide range of authorities are lying to my face. So, there’s a, you know, there’s a certain degree of low trust going on there.

But in general, you’re not going to change your political beliefs and behaviors based off those things. However, there are other conspiracy beliefs that create fear. And this goes back to this idea of fear. If you believe that a vaccine that you’re being told that you have to get is actually some kind of untested technology. If you believe that a pandemic that you’re being toldis, you have to restrict your behaviors and movements in order to try to deal with, is actually invented and not real. If you believe that an election was stolen from your preferred candidate, those are things that you interpret as attacks on you, on your family, and on your community. And in that case, you are very motivated to go out there and try to do something about it.

Now, that could just be supporting a fringe extremist political party. It could go all the way up to being something more like political violence. And we have seen people, even in Japan, take violent actions off the back of their conspiracy beliefs. So, we can certainly draw some kind of a line in terms of people who have conspiracy beliefs that are just sort of a dumb thing that they say when they’re a bit drunk versus people who have conspiracy beliefs that are, my family, my community is under threat, and I must do something about it.

This is actually the study, the subject of a paper that we published last year in Political Studies. We looked at survey information that we had collected from around the election in the United States in 2020. And we found that looking across a whole bunch of different factors, it was people’s degree of conspiracy belief that was the biggest and most clear predictor of whether they supported political violence during that election, which, of course, was the election after which January 6 happened. So, this isn’t saying it made them go out and commit political violence, but in terms of whether you were willing to tolerate violence in your society, whether you believe in conspiracy theories was the biggest predictor that we found of that.

This was a paper that I coauthored with Professor Airo Hino from the School of Political Science here, and Professor Sebastian Jungkunz. And so, this was a really interesting study that we’re actually currently running a very similar survey in the United States over the 2024 election to try and see whether things have changed. But I suspect conspiracy theories are still going to be very relevant to people’s willingness to tolerate political violence in their society.

MC Romeo (32:03) :

In the past year of Japanese politics, we’ve seen a lot of change, I think. We’ve seen smaller parties such as Reiwa Shinsengumi overtake the Communist Party. We’ve seen a right wing, somewhat nationalist party in the vein of Sanseito called the Conservative Party. A lot of these parties, they do actually seem to profess a couple of forms of conspiracy theories, as well. And I think the listeners are wondering, do you believe that parties like these are going to become a much more permanent fixture in the realm of Japanese politics, or is their influence going to wane like it has before?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (32:41)

We’ve mentioned before that niche parties rise and fall in Japan on a pretty regular cycle. So, we see niche parties bubble up, take a few seats, and then usually what happens is that the mainstream parties of the opposition and government regain their strength and the niche parties just kind of get absorbed into them.

So, in some senses, a lot of people tend to start niche parties as a pathway to getting a higher position within a mainstream party. If you go out and start your own little niche party, then maybe you can use that to elbow your way into a more significant position within the LDP when you rejoin.

That’s not quite what has happened with these parties. These are parties of outsiders to the political system. And as you say, they all have some degree of embrace of conspiracy theories. Part of that is because they’re all populists. And populism is something that has not been such a huge trend in Japan to the extent that it has been in other countries. Populism here has tended to be more confined to regional politics rather than a national level politics. But in these cases, with these niche parties, they do all have a very populists aspect to their rhetoric. And one of the key things about populist rhetoric is that it involves telling people that there is a group of elites that are conspiring against them. So, there’s always a little bit of a conspiracy theory built into populism.

 And I think that’s kind of what you’re seeing there with those parties. Of course, in the case of Sanseito, it’s not a little bit of conspiracy theory, it’s a lot of conspiracy theory. I should say, of course, they reject that label not because they reject how anybody defines what their beliefs are, but because they insist that their beliefs are just the truth and therefore, we shouldn’t be calling them conspiracy theories. They get quite angry about that. But in the case of these other parties, there’s also a certain conspiratorial aspect, just because their messaging and the way that they use their rhetoric requires them to tell people there are elites out there who are conspiring to hold you back and push you down. So that’s something that I think is probably going to become a permanent fixture because it has been successful. And even if those parties themselves disappear, somebody else will be along to pick up that rhetoric and to pick up that strategy, because once it’s been proven successful, it’s not going to go away.

MC Romeo (34:55):

Looking beyond Japan, do you see similar patterns emerging globally where conspiracy beliefs are gaining traction in the political sphere? If so, what does this indicate for the future of global democracy and how should international leaders respond?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (35:07):

There is absolutely a global rise of conspiracy beliefs. This is not confined to Japan. If anything, it’s probably not as bad in Japan as it is in quite a few other countries, partially because the mainstream media here is still very powerful. You know, an awful lot of people in this country still receive their information from the Asahi Shimbun, the Yomiuri Shinbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, all of these three big newspapers, and from NHK, the national broadcaster. And therefore, there is still a gatekeeper in place to an extent that we don’t necessarily see in some other countries.

However, on a global scale, the cordon sanitaire, the sort of immune system response that we had within society that would surround a conspiracy theory actor and kind of push them out of public discourses, that’s basically gone. You know, it’s still lingering in Japan, but it’s gone for the most part globally. And that has a huge implication for democracy around the world.

I don’t know exactly where those implications end, because I don’t think any of us have thought through how you govern a society in which people cannot agree on the basic facts of the world, and in which simple historical facts and social facts and the reasons for events and even the events themselves suddenly become a topic for debate rather than an agreed upon consensus reality. I don’t think anyone’s thought through how that kind of society can be governable. So, we have to find solutions. We have to find a way to reconstruct the consensus reality around our society. And some of that effort is going to have to be international because the flows of information are international.

We see with Sanseito to look back at them as a case study that a lot of their conspiracy theories come from English language media originally. They import conspiracy theories from the United States and elsewhere, and they kind of sprinkle a little bit of Japanese-ness on them and translate them for their audience here. So, these information flows go across borders. We do surveys in lots and lots of different countries. And out of interest, I started adding some questions about really American specific conspiracy theories and found that there are tons of people in places like the Philippines and Brazil and so on who believe in specifically American conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with them. They’re entirely domestic American conspiracy theories.

So, there’s a need for an international response to this problem with information. What that is a huge question. And I don’t think there is any single silver bullet. Some people point to educational approaches. They point out that our education system, because this change has been so rapid, has not really learned how to arm people to deal with an information environment that is so full of misinformation. So, a lot of people never fact check anything they’re told, and they’re not told how to do that. There’s no kind of teaching people how to evaluate the validity of an information source. So that’s something that perhaps we can look at as educational methods.

We can look at better regulatory frameworks. We know that social media platforms do a terrible job of handling misinformation, of handling conspiracy theories, that very often the algorithms these platforms use are actually promoting conspiracy theories to us because those conspiracy theories make us click on things. And they don’t care whether it’s misinformation or not, as long as you click on things. So that aspect is something that, you know, maybe on a regulatory level can be dealt with to some extent, but it’s not going to fix everything.

Something else we can look at is really thinking about the most severe impacts of these types of misinformation and conspiracy belief, which is figuring out monitoring that will let us have a, a good early warning system for radicalization. Because the real fear, of course, is that, sure, you may only have a certain number of people who believe a conspiracy theory, but all it takes is one of those people to decide that they need to take matters into their own hands to fix this. And then you get assassinations and killings and bombings and stuff. And that’s the ultimate endpoint of radicalization.

A major problem that has emerged in the last few years is that social media platforms have actually shut down the access that researchers and public authorities had to see what’s happening on those platforms. So, we used to have a lot of access to Twitter data and Facebook data. We could see what was happening within communities on those platforms, and that’s now mostly gone. They’ve really put down the shutters and stopped anyone from seeing in. And at a time when radicalization on those platforms is such a major concern, that’s a really big problem. Those are all potential countermeasures. None of them are going to solve the problem overall. There is no silver bullet. There’s no one size fits all solution or one neat trick that’s going to be the one policy that fixes this.

MC Romeo (39:47):

What is the most critical aspect of political science research that scholars and policymakers should focus on in the next couple of years?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (39:56):

As I said, there’s no single aspect that is going to fix the problems that we’re talking about. There’s no magic wand that we can wave that’s going to make democracy more secure than it has been. But I think that, and of course I would say this given the focus of my research, but I think that the information environment and understanding the fragmentation of that information environment, the role of things like filter bubbles, which is this idea of us creating our own little information reality around ourselves, that is something that political scientists across lots of different fields and policymakers across lots of different fields really need to be focusing on.

Like I said, I came to this research from the perspective of thinking about information flows during a major natural disaster. So, if you’re somebody who is designing policy to deal with natural disasters, you need to have somebody who’s thinking about how are we going to deal with the inevitable rise of conspiracy theories in the hours and days after the next natural disaster? Somebody needs to be thinking about what your countermeasures to threats from the information environment are. We saw after the two devastating hurricanes in the United States that hit one after the other last October, there were areas that aid workers had to kind of write off– they couldn’t go into because conspiracy theories about the aid workers had spread, and people were threatening them with guns. So, an actual response to natural disaster was disrupted by conspiracy theory. And we’re seeing some similar stuff happening now with the wildfires in California.

That is something that in Japan we need to be thinking about as well, because it’s going to happen here too the next time there’s a very major natural disaster. There is going to be a certain group of people who are going to spread misinformation about it. And it’s not just natural disasters. It’s every area of policy. There is going to be a threat of conspiracy, of misinformation, information environment threat to the implementation of any type of policy you want to think about. And that is what policymakers, and political scientists really need to be thinking about. There needs to be an integration of that into every aspect of the discipline.

MC Romeo (42:00):

Before we wrap up today’s podcast, I have one more question for you. Besides being a researcher, you also take a great interest in teaching international and Japanese students at Waseda. Could you tell us a little bit more about your Waseda connection and your work with the research community in political science there?

Guest Prof. Fahey  (42:15):

Yeah, so my connection to Waseda runs pretty deep. I’ve been here since 2013. I did my master’s and PhD here, and I’ve worked here as a researcher in a couple of different roles for the last six years. I’m currently at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, which is this really great interdisciplinary institute where we have people from across humanities and social sciences and physical sciences. So, it’s a fascinating opportunity to kind of build research out with people from very different disciplines to my own, and also to hear about what they’re doing in their fields, which has been really kind of very much an exercise in expanding my horizons.

At the same time, I also teach at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics, which is where I did my PhD and that’s a really interesting and fascinating experience because there’s such an extraordinary mix of students in the classroom, not just in terms of where they’re from, but also the educational systems that they came through, the interests that they have. It’s such a global classroom, and that’s such a privilege to be able to teach that. It’s also a big challenge sometimes, but that is what makes it interesting. You know, the education, the opportunity to be an educator here at Waseda, having been educated here myself, is something that’s been really valuable to me, and it’s something that I think students would also really benefit from attending here at Waseda just because of that opportunity to have such a global environment around you.

MC Romeo (43:37):

Okay, Dr. Fahey. Thank you once again for sharing your insights on the rise of political movements fueled by conspiracy rhetoric. Your research highlights the intricate nature of today’s political landscape and underscores the significant influence of the information environment on political behavior. You’ve provided a thoughtful perspective on the challenges of growing populism and the potential pathways for future political engagement.

And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. For more such stories and insights from the corridors of Waseda University, don’t forget to subscribe and tune into the next episode on “Rigorous Research, Real Impact.” Until then, take care and stay curious.