Beyond Partisanship: Explaining Vaccine Attitudes through Cultural Capital

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Trust, Mistrust, and Distrust

Abstract

In the post-COVID-19 United States, previous research demonstrates a strong correlation between political partisanship and vaccine attitudes; however, recent data from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) indicate heterogeneity within partisanship, with nearly 60% of Democrats declining the routine flu shot. This study argues that cultural capital—specifically, embodied dispositions toward institutional authority—serve as a critical, overlooked dimension of vaccine sentiment that explains this variation. I analyze the digital habitus (e.g., number of online interactions or presence) of users discussing the flu vaccine in 2022 on Reddit. To do this, I create a dataset that reconstructs the history of individual user activity and measure three dimensions of cultural capital: (1) community engagement in high-status subreddits, (2) linguistic complexity, and (3) claimed cultural capital which is observed in posts that invoke expertise or specialized knowledge. In this data, political partisanship is operationalized via a semi-supervised framework based on community engagement patterns. Using regression modeling, I test two mechanisms to explain the heterogeneity in vaccine attitudes across political partisanship. I hypothesize a "buffering effect," in which cultural capital sustains trust regardless of partisanship, and a "sophisticated resistance," in which high-status users utilize scientific language and claims of independent research to reframe vaccine skepticism as a form of empowered, informed decision-making. This study extends research on vaccine attitudes beyond partisanship by showing how cultural inequalities become legible in the discourse of digital publics.

Author

• Yuanxi Li, University of Washington