Autocratic Experiences & COVID-19: How an Autocratic Past Shapes Vaccine Uptake

• In Event: Health Policy: Challenges and New Directions

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic can only be contained through cooperation between the public and governments. Over the course of the pandemic countries showed different levels of this cooperation (see, e.g., Bargain and Aminjonov, 2020). In particular countries displayed large variance in vaccine uptake (see Salomoni et al., 2021). This leads us to our question: Why does vaccination reluctance vary between countries? The answer we propose is that an individual’s autocratic experience is a crucial but previously overlooked factor in determining vaccine uptake. Our main argument is that a recent autocratic history makes citizens distrustful of government policies that infringe civil liberties, especially when it comes to health policies which often play a crucial role in autocracies (see, e.g., Schäfer, 2005; Xu and Jin, 2018). Previous contributions have already addressed the difference in the pandemic response of autocratic and democratic regimes as well as populist and non-populist governments (e.g., Bayerlein and Gyöngyösi, 2020; Stasavage, 2020). Surprisingly, what is still missing, is research on the question why some citizens comply with policies of their government while others do not. The few existing studies only focus on the perception of government risk communication (e.g., Thanh et al., 2021), address single cases (e.g., Dunn and Laterzo, 2021) or analyse general levels of trust (e.g., Goldstein and Wiedemann, 2020) without including the specific determinants of trust, i.e., autocratic experiences. In addressing this research gap, we make two important contributions. First, focusing on a measure of autocratic past, we analyse a previously overlooked determinant of public compliance with public health policies, like vaccine roll-outs. Second, finding a positive association between autocratic past and lack of compliance, we can draw inferences on how governments can take into account autocratic experiences of citizens in communicating and implementing health policies. We analyse the correlation between autocratic past and citizen compliance in a sample of 33 developed and developing European countries in the summer of 2021 by employing a generalised structural equation model (GSEM). Our first results indicate a correlation between autocratic experience and vaccine uptake via trust.

Authors

• Vanessa Alexandra Boese-Schlosser, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Scott Gates, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and University of Oslo

• Katrin Kamin, Kiel Institute for the World Economy

• S Mansoob Murshed, ISS-Erasmus University of Rotterdam

• Michael Bayerlein, Charité University Hospital