Trust Issues? How Being Socialised in an Autocracy Shapes Vaccine Uptake (with with Michael Bayerlein, Vanessa Boese, Scott Gates and Katrin Kamin)

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.