Does Vaccination Increase Political Trust?

• In Event: On (Not) Trusting in Politics

Abstract

During the COVID-19 days, we assumed that people got vaccines because they trusted the government. We, laypersons, did not know much about the COVID-19 vaccines, their effects, and their side-effects, but the government encouraged/required us to get vaccines, and so did we. Those who got vaccines were likely to have basic trust in the government. Simply, we could conclude that people got vaccinated because they trusted the government. Is the relationship so simple? This paper aims to disentangle the complicated relationship between political trust and citizens’ behavior during COVID-19 days. I hypothesize that people trust their government more than before if they followed the government policies such as vaccination. Here, the causal relationship is reversed. People trust governments because they follow the government’s rules. This logic comes from Hetherington’s Sacrifice Theory that people have to trust the government when the enacted policy requires perceived sacrifice or perceived risk. If this hypothesis is true, people who got vaccinated over three times during the pandemic days are more likely to show favorable attitudes toward the current government and stronger trust in the government. Using two sets of online survey data collected in 2023 summer and 2023 fall respectively in Japan, this project tries to depict the clearer relationship between political trust and behavior during the pandemic.

Author

• Miwa Nakajo, Tsuda University