PARTY AFFILIATION AND BELIEF IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES: CASE STUDY OF SMOLENSK PLANE CRASH

On April 10, 2010, ninety-six people died in the plane crash near Smolensk, including the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczy & nacute;ski. To this day, many conspiracies have grown around this event regarding the alleged assassination in which Russian secret services were supposed to be involved. The aim of the article is to diagnose how social identity created based on party identification affects conspiracy thinking connected with the presidential Tu-154 plane crash. We analyse research on belief in the Smolensk attack theory conducted by Polish opinion research centres in 2010-2022. They show that the voters of the Law and Justice party believe to a much greater extent that the Smolensk catastrophe is, in fact, an assassination of President Lech Kaczy & nacute;ski ordered by Vladimir Putin. The conducted analysis confirms that the political dimension of social identity (conceptualized in the study as trust in Law and Justice government and party identification) determines the endorsement of the Smolensk conspiracy. This factor is more important for belief in the assassination theory than such factors as conspiracy mentality, gender, age, place of residence, and education.