Conspiracism in Comparison: The Case of Bulgaria

This case study was composed using the TaCT-FoRSED framework for explorative case studies for conspiracism research (Christoph et. al. 2025). This is a pre-print of the case study to be published soon in an edited volume. Bulgaria exhibits simultaneously one of the most depressed levels of institutional democratic performance among EU member states and one of the highest rates of conspiracy belief documented in European comparative surveys. This confluence is not coincidental. The deficits of Bulgarian democracy constitute a structural context in which conspiracy mentality finds a fertile ground. At the same time, conspiracy narratives feed back into this context, eroding the democratic resources available to individuals and institutions. The analysis of these reciprocal dynamics identifies the primary promoters of conspiracism in Bulgaria: chronic governance failure; socioeconomic deprivation and inequality; party system fragmentation; political trust collapse; media ecosystem vulnerability; geopolitical exposure; weakened civil society. The Bulgarian case indicates that the systemic influence of conspiracism in Bulgaria operates not through authoritarian channels but rather through the democratic mechanisms of electoral competition, parliamentary deliberation, and judicial review. The regime's conspiratorial vulnerability is, in this sense, a democratic vulnerability.