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How legacies of international politics affect contemporary health outcomes:

Historical border changes and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

Add to calendar 2023-05-09 17:00 2023-05-09 18:30 Europe/Rome How legacies of international politics affect contemporary health outcomes: Refectory Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD
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Scheduled dates

May 09 2023

17:00 - 18:30 CEST

Refectory, Badia Fiesolana

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In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a paper presentation by Matthew Gabel (Washington University in St. Louis), co-authored with David B. Carter (Washington University) and Alma Velazquez (Washington University).
Vaccine hesitancy has hindered many governments' efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Recent research demonstrates that low trust in government is a key predictor of non-compliance with COVID-19 mitigation policies. How trust deficits might be remedied to increase compliance and save lives depends crucially on the sources of political distrust that influence vaccine hesitancy. We build on research that links historical border changes to contemporary trust deficits, and show that the number of border changes in a given locality relative to neighbouring units in the same small subcountry region significantly affects COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic. Importantly, these deeply historical border changes are plausibly exogenous to the current public health crisis and also clarify the efficacy of proposed policies to increase vaccination. Our findings are robust to numerous alternative specifications, tests that deal with potential post-treatment biases, and tests of sensitivity to selection on unobservables.

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