Political Partisanship and Trust in Government Predict Popular Support for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates for Various Professions and Demographic Groups: A Research Note

Abstract

Due to the slow rate of COVID-19 vaccine uptake and the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant, governments are considering mandating COVID-19 vaccination for specific professions and demographic groups. This study evaluates popular attitudes toward such policies. We fielded a survey of 535 registered voters in South Dakota to examine popular attitudes towards vaccine mandates for five groups—children 12 and older, K-12 teachers, medical staff, nursing homes staff, and police personnel. We estimated a series of logistic regression models and presented predicted probabilities to find the primary determinants of these attitudes. Results revealed that political partisanship and trust in government are strong predictors of support for vaccine mandates across all models. Should government and public health officials wish to increase the proportion of people vaccinated for COVID-19, they must recognize the limitations of current public health campaigns, and reshape their efforts in congruence with scientific findings.

Partisan self-identification predicts attitudes of South Dakota nurses toward COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers

“…First, the partisan composition of our sample closely resembled the state population. Scholars have documented that the South Dakota population decidedly leans toward political conservatism and strongly supports the Republican Party [ 31 , 32 ]. This preference is reflected in our sample which has a prevalence of Republican nurses.…”

COVID-19 Parental Vaccine Hesitancy Among Nurses in the State of South Dakota

“…Partisan self-identification in American politics can be treated as an ordinal variable since nearly all self-identified independents place themselves spatially between Democrats and Republicans. This is common practice in political science and psychological research [28,29,25]. Binary indicators are included for gender (1 = female) and evangelical identification (1 = evangelical).…”

“…Scholars have noted the unprecedented politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, particularly on the issue of vaccination [22,23]. In the United States, differences exist between Republicans and Democrats across a range of behaviors, such as support for COVID-19 mitigation measures [24], COVID-19 vaccine uptake [25], and support for COVID-19 vaccination mandates [26]. It is therefore likely that we will observe differences between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to vaccinating their children.…”

Conspiracy Beliefs and Vaccine Mandates: Exploring the Politicized determinants for Attitudes to COVID-19 Control in China

“…However, in France, compared with partisans of the center, partisans of the far left and green parties were more likely to be opposed to mandatory COVID-19 vaccine [23]. Though the directions of support by partisans were inconsistent across nations, political inclinations were strong predictors of attitudes to MV in many Western countries [15,24].…”