Vaccine Hesitancy and Political Populism. An Invariant Cross-European Perspective

Almudena Recio-Román, Manuel Recio-Menéndez and María Victoría Román-González
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Almudena Recio-Román: Department of Economics and Business, University of Almería, Carretera de Sacramento s/n, 04120 Almería, Spain
Manuel Recio-Menéndez: Department of Economics and Business, University of Almería, Carretera de Sacramento s/n, 04120 Almería, Spain
María Victoría Román-González: Department of Economics and Business, University of Almería, Carretera de Sacramento s/n, 04120 Almería, Spain

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 24, 1-20

Abstract: Vaccine-hesitancy and political populism are positively associated across Europe: those countries in which their citizens present higher populist attitudes are those that also have higher vaccine-hesitancy rates. The same key driver fuels them: distrust in institutions, elites, and experts. The reluctance of citizens to be vaccinated fits perfectly in populist political agendas because is a source of instability that has a distinctive characteristic known as the “small pockets” issue. It means that the level at which immunization coverage needs to be maintained to be effective is so high that a small number of vaccine-hesitants have enormous adverse effects on herd immunity and epidemic spread. In pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios, vaccine-hesitancy could be used by populists as one of the most effective tools for generating distrust. This research presents an invariant measurement model applied to 27 EU + UK countries (27,524 participants) that segments the different behaviours found, and gives social-marketing recommendations for coping with the vaccine-hesitancy problem when used for generating distrust.

Keywords: vaccine hesitancy; populism; alignment; invariance; social marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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