Visions of Politics: Mapping Ideological Resonance in QAnon's Global Diffusion

QAnon's global diffusion presents a compelling puzzle for understanding how ideologies spread across cultural boundaries. This study develops a framework for measuring ideological resonance through the alignment of social ontologies -- the meaningful representations of political fields that ideologies provide their adherents. I argue that conspiracy theories serve as symbolic reconstructions of political space that help believers identify friends and foes, and that their successful diffusion requires structural compatibility between source and host fields. Combining socio-symbolic network analysis with word embedding methods on 28.4 million Telegram posts from American and German QAnon communities (2019–2022), I reconstruct and compare latent political fields through principal component analyses (PCA) and projections onto theoretically motivated semantic axes. The results demonstrate strong alignment between American and German QAnon worldviews across three dimensions: comparable actor groups (local elites, alternative politicians, resistance figures), similar organizing axes (political-epistemic conflict, institutional-individual distinctions, and an affective good-bad dimension), and homologous distributional patterns within reconstructed political fields. Word embedding analyses further reveal that a shared populist imagination provides the strongest cross-contextual anchor, while political and epistemic themes consistently structure affective evaluations. Local adaptations -- the diminished role of biblical religious figures, the incorporation of European institutions into the antagonist coalition, and a distinctive New Age transcendental register in German discourses -- illustrate how resonance operates through selective compatibility rather than wholesale ideological transfer. These findings contribute to diffusion theory a measurable framework for understanding how cultural templates achieve cross-contextual appeal during periods of crisis politics.