The Politics of Covid-19 Vaccination Hesitancy in Southeast Europe

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 to be correlated with education, trust in public health institutions, and exposure to the negative economic and health effects of the pandemic. The political foundations of vaccine hesitancy, however, have been under-researched beyond the US context. 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 on the level of more than five hundred municipalities in Croatia. Most notably, we find the political sources of vaccine hesitancy to be strongly related to people’s support for the ideas of and political parties committed to nationalist populism.