The Politics of Vaccine Hesitancy in Europe

What is the role of populist parties and citizens’ political orientations for vaccine hesitancy in Europe? Vaccines are a way to deal with many diseases, but their effectiveness depends on the public uptake. COVID-19 hit the world when vaccine hesitancy was already widespread. At the same time, we witness a growing success of populist parties (Norris and Inglehart, 2019) as well as anti-elite and anti-science sentiments (Hornsey and Fielding, 2017). This paper makes several contributions. We show the relationship between citizens’ political orientations and their views of vaccines using large-N cross sectional survey data from all EU member states. Although vaccine hesitancy is low among most voters, a significant group of vaccine hesitant citizens exists in all EU member states already before COVID-19. When it comes to the political correlates of vaccine hesitancy, it is not citizens’ ideological orientations on the left-right dimension that are linked to vaccine hesitancy. Instead, we find that anti-elite world views are predictors of vaccine hesitancy. Additionally, our analysis reveals that vaccine hesitancy is related to culturally closed (authoritarian) positions. Hence, there is much overlap between the factors that correlate with vaccine hesitancy and with support for (far right) populist parties. We also examine a potential causal role of these parties. We analyse time series data of vaccine uptake in Europe obtained from the WHO and link this data to a time series of support for populist parties from the European Values Survey. We do not see an increase in the strength of populist parties to precede a decrease in vaccine uptake in a systematic fashion across time and countries. While far right populist parties benefit from anti-establishment and authoritarian sentiments, our analysis of time series data does not indicate that populist parties play a causal role for vaccine hesitancy.