Trust issues? How being socialised in an autocracy shapes vaccine uptake

Vanessa A. Boese-Schlosser, Michael Bayerlein, Scott Gates, Katrin Kamin and Syed Mansoob Murshed

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Transformations of Democracy from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic increased pressure on the relationship between governments and the public, making cooperation between both actors more critical than ever. Surprisingly, there is significant variation in public compliance with health policies, especially regarding vaccine uptake across different countries. Based on this finding, we seek to understand why vaccination hesitancy varies between countries. Instead of focusing solely on government trust and satisfaction, this research examines the impact of individuals' experiences having lived in autocratic countries on vaccine hesitancy. We derive a formal model of how autocratic experience and the subsequent distrust in health policies affect the individual calculus on vaccine uptake, and test the propositions of our model in a sample of 33 European countries on the micro-level. We find that autocratic experience gravely impacts individual vaccine hesitancy. Our findings shed light on the prolonged impact of autocratic rule on societal processes and on the roots of vaccine hesitancy, which is not rooted in general distrust but rather a highly specific form of scepticism towards government action.

Keywords: Autocracy; COVID-19; Pandemic; Vaccination; Public Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/280396/1/1871291356.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wzbtod:280396

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Transformations of Democracy from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().