Don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet, but there was an excellent psych study done 2 or so years ago showing that believing in conspiracy theories is linked to the experience of powerlessness or helplessness:
This post over at scienceblogs gives the citation and gives a great rundown of how the experiments worked:

Control and security are vital parts of our psychological well-being and it goes without saying that losing them can feel depressing or scary. As such, people have strategies for trying to regain a sense control even if it’s a tenuous one. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky from the University of Texas have found that one such strategy is to identify coherent and meaningful relationships between things we observe.

These patterns can help us to make sense of past events and predict future ones, affording us a degree of control over our fates, albeit an indirect one. We can’t change the weather, for example, but if we can tell when it’s going to rain, we can be prepared. At the more extreme end, conspiracy theories can help the bewildered to make sense of otherwise unconnected events. And explaining random events by invoking superstitions or higher beings can help to bring reality’s many possibilities within one’s understanding, if not under one’s heel.

Whitson and Galinsky demonstrated the link between desiring control and seeing patterns through a set of experiments that used a variety of psychological tricks to induce feelings of insecurity among groups of volunteers. With these tricks, they managed to induce a number of different illusions - increasing the risk of seeing false images, making links between unrelated events, creating conspiracy theories and even accepting superstitious rituals. Superficially, all of these behaviours seem quite different but they all involve seeing patterns where none exist. They have a common theme and now, this study suggests that they have a common motive too

So, it might seem very common sense to say that teabaggers are drawn to conspiracy theories because they feel their lives are out of control and they lack power, but there’s some good science that would back up the claim that in an uncertain economic climate like this one you’d get people feeling powerless and therefore also looking to conspiracy theories. Lot of overlap with conspiracists and the tea party’s original and natural base, is what I’m saying.