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

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

doi:10.3390/ijerph182412953

Almudena Recio-Román, María Victoría Román-González + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182412953

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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.

Highlights

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
Vaccine hesitancy and political populism are propelled by similar motivations: a profound distrust in elites and experts
As the goal of our research is to develop a parsimonious invariant measurement model for testing the relationship between vaccine hesitancy and populism in general terms, only two drivers would be considered: the usefulness of being vaccinated and trust in the institutions that form the vaccine environment

Summary

Introduction

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. We aim to expand previous works by studying this underlying link with individual data that come from a large-scale survey that includes all the countries that belong to EU-27 + U.K. In that vein, Europe is the region with the highest level of vaccine hesitancy [4] and populism has recently been on an upward trend [5]. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

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