Belief in Conspiracy Theories: What Do the Data Say?
Gelman has it right - the reason I am registered “D” instead of “R” is that the GOP leadership didn’t used to subscribe to the kookery themselves, but now they do.
The big difference here is that Krugman explicitly says there have been changes since the 1980s, i.e., that many influential Republican leaders became associated with conspiracy theories during the Clinton years and stayed that way, with no corresponding conspiratorial shift among influential Democrats. Bernstein doesn’t specify dates but my impression is that he holds the same view.
In contrast, Parent and Uscinski identify conspiracy theorizing as coming from “out-of-power elites” so they might agree that Republican leaders believed in conspiracies during the Clinton and Obama presidencies but that Democratic leaders similarly believed in conspiracies during the Bush years.
Nobody is claiming that there is something conspiratorial about conservative elites that is unique and lasting, not if you define “lasting” as lasting back before 1992.