The Politics of Covid-19 Vaccination Hesitancy in Southeastern Europe

Abstract

The execution of Covid-19 vaccination drives in former Yugoslavia’s successor states has been disappointing. The rapidly evolving literature on the Covid-19 pandemic suggests the levels of support for vaccination are correlated with education, trust in public-health institutions, and exposure to the negative economic and health effects of the pandemic. The explanations of the political foundations of vaccination hesitancy, however, need better empirical grounding. We shed light on this subject by analyzing the results of a survey conducted on more than six thousand respondents from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, as well as a combination of public-health, economic, and sociodemographic data across more than five hundred municipalities in Croatia. Most notably, we find the political sources of vaccination hesitancy to be strongly related to people’s support for the ideas of political parties committed to nationalist populism.

Keywords

• covid-19
• vaccination hesitancy
• southeastern europe
• populism
• nationalism