Political Populism, Institutional Distrust and Vaccination Uptake: A Mediation Analysis.

Almudena Recio-Román,Manuel Recio-Menéndez,María Victoria Román-González

doi:10.3390/ijerph19063265

Almudena Recio-Román, Manuel Recio-Menéndez + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19063265

Copy DOI

Abstract

Politics is ubiquitous in public health, but vaccines had never been weaponized to instill distrust to gain political advantage. In pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios, populist political parties could use vaccine-related issues to generate distrust in evidence-based knowledge. Therefore, some questions arise. What impact could populist political parties impinge on vaccination uptake rates through sowing political discontent? What could the medical institutions do to avoid the adverse effects that these political strategies could infringe? For answering these research questions, we first hypothesized that vaccine uptake was negatively associated with distrust in the institutions. Furthermore, we analyzed whether populism mediates this relationship. In doing so, we hypothesized a positive association between distrust and populism, because populists, mainly fueled by politically discontent citizens, offer hope of a better future, blaming their misfortune on the actions of the elite. Additionally, we hypothesized that those citizens with a higher level of political dissatisfaction, following the claims of the populist political parties, will have lower vaccine uptake results, because they will be discouraged from making the efforts to counter the pandemic. Based on a survey carried out by the European Commission that covered 27 E.U. + U.K. countries (totaling 27,524 respondents), this paper proves that an individual’s political discontent fully mediates the relationship between distrust in institutions and vaccine uptake. Targeting the vaccine-hesitant population is quite convenient for populists because they only need to convince a minority of citizens not to be vaccinated to achieve their destabilizing goals. New outbreaks will appear if the minimum herd immunity coverage is not reached, reinforcing a vicious circle of distrust in elites, in consequence. For tackling this matter, recommendations are given to institutional managers from a social marketing standpoint.

Highlights

COVID-19 has brought forward a new role for politics, in the global vaccines scenario [1]
Politics is ubiquitous in public health [3], but vaccines have never been weaponized to instill distrust to gain a political advantage [4]
Fit statistics indicated that the Structural equation modeling (SEM) fitted the data well (χ2 = 5369.989, df = 312, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.964, Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.959 standardized root mean residual (SRMR) = 0.054, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.025 (0.024, 0.025)), and all standardized path coefficients were significant, except for the direct effect of DISTRUST on VACCINE

Summary

Introduction

COVID-19 has brought forward a new role for politics, in the global vaccines scenario [1]. Politics played, and still plays nowadays, an essential role in several other vaccine-related dimensions: research and development, procurement, production, and marketing activities [2]. Politics is ubiquitous in public health [3], but vaccines have never been weaponized to instill distrust to gain a political advantage [4]. An upward trend supporting populist parties is present in developed and developing countries, implying a significant challenge for universal healthcare [5]. Political populism defends ordinary people in contrast with the real or perceived elite. The elite usually refers to mainstream political parties, the media, the upper classes, intellectuals, and, in the territorial scope of this work, the European Union [7]. When applied to healthcare issues, medical populism [8] is based on a distrust of evidence-based

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion