QAnon's global diffusion presents a compelling puzzle for understanding how ideologies spread across cultural boundaries. This study develops and tests a framework for measuring ideological resonance through the alignment of social ontologies – the meaningful representations of political fields that ideologies provide to their adherents. I argue that conspiracy theories, like other ideologies, serve as symbolic reconstructions of political space that help believers navigate complex alliance structures and identify relevant friends and foes. Using socio-symbolic network analysis on 28.4 million Telegram posts from U.S.-American and German QAnon communities (2019-2022), I reconstruct the latent political fields embedded in conspiracy discourses through named entity recognition and semantic motif extraction. Two complementary analytical approaches – standard and subjectively ‘distorted’ principal component analysis – reveal how conspiracy theorists organize political actors through symbolic action associations. The results demonstrate strong alignment between American and German QAnon worldviews across three dimensions: comparable actor groups (local elites, alternative politicians, spiritual figures), similar organizing axes (politicalepistemic conflict, institutional-individual distinctions), and homologous distributional patterns within reconstructed political fields. However, the analysis also reveals important local adaptations, particularly the diminished role of religious figures in German discourses and the incorporation of European institutions into the conspiracy's antagonist coalition. These findings suggest that resonance involves selective compatibility rather than wholesale ideological transfer, with successful diffusion requiring structural similarities that allow for meaningful local translation. These findings contribute to diffusion theory by providing a measurable framework for understanding how cultural templates achieve cross-contextual appeal.
