Objectives

Prior research highlights the role of efficacy, vaccine safety, and availability in vaccine hesitancy. Research is needed to better understand the political driving forces behind COVID-19 vaccine uptake. We examine the effects of the origin of a vaccine, and approval status within the EU on vaccine choice. We also test if these effects differ by party affiliation among Hungarians.

Study design

We utilise a conjoint experimental design to assess multiple causal relationships. Respondents choose between two hypothetical vaccine profiles randomly generated from ten attributes. The data were gathered from an online panel in September 2022. We applied a quota for vaccination status and party preference. 324 respondents evaluated 3,888 randomly generated vaccine profiles.

Methods

We analyse the data using an OLS estimator with standard errors clustered across respondents. To further nuance our results, we test for task, profile, and treatment heterogeneity effects.

Results

By origin, respondents prefer German (MM 0.55; 95% CI 0.52– 0.58) and Hungarian (0.55; 0.52 – 0.59) vaccines over US (0.49; 0.45– 0.52) and Chinese vaccines (0.44; 0.41 – 0.47). By approval status, vaccines approved by the EU (0.55, 0.52–0.57) or pending authorization (0.5, 0.48–0.53) are preferred over unauthorised ones (0.45, 0.43–0.47). Both effects are conditional on party affiliation. Government voters especially prefer Hungarian vaccines (0.6; 0.55 - 0.65) over others.

Conclusions

The complexity of vaccination decisions calls for the usage of information shortcuts. Our findings demonstrate a strong political component which motivates vaccine choice. We demonstrate that politics and ideology have broken into fields of individual-level decisions such as health.

The paper can be downloaded by clicking here.