GOP Leaders Endorsement of COVID-19 VAX Could Persuade Constituents to Get Jabs--While Dem Endorsements Have a ‘Backlash,’ Northwestern Researcher Finds
New research by a Northwestern University political scientist suggests that messages from partisan political elites can be used to persuade the public to undergo vaccination against COVID-19.
But messages have to be directed to the correct audience or they can result in a “backlash” effect, according to James Druckman, PhD, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
Partisan political elites are elected officials or candidates who are full-time politicians. Social scientists have long studied how these political actors impact the public’s thinking.
“There is a general understanding that when certain conditions are met that partisan elites can have a fair amount of influence. When would somebody who is a political elite have an impact? I think one condition is there has to be some politicization of the topic at hand,” said Druckman.
COVID-19, from the advent of the pandemic in March 2020, has been politicized with large numbers of Republicans making opposition to COVID-19 vaccination a matter of political identity, he said.
Polling shows that the proportion of Americans who report intending to get vaccinated, or who have already gotten vaccinated, had risen from 45% in November 2020 to 72% in late May 2021.
”However, this decline in vaccine hesitancy has not been evenly distributed across Americans. While initially hesitant groups that are largely Democrats -- such as Black people and Latinos -- have shown steadily declining hesitancy, the proportion of Republicans who report they do not intend to vaccinate or are unsure has remained high, at 64% in November 2020 and 49% in late May 2021,” Druckman and colleagues reported in their forthcoming article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.
Motivating Republicans to be vaccinated is key to containing the pandemic and reaching herd immunity.
Druckman and his colleagues conducted a survey of about 1,500 Republicans in an experiment as they reacted to videos of former President Donald Trump, who played a prominent role in the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccines, and of President Joseph Biden, who has promoted a vaccination campaign.
Study participants were assigned randomly to three groups: (1) a group that viewed a video in which Trump endorsed vaccination where participants read an essay highlighting vaccine endorsements by leading Republicans and the role Republicans played in development and distribution of the vaccines; (2) participants viewed a video in which Biden endorses vaccination, where participants read an essay highlighting the Democrats role in developing and distributing the vaccine; and (3) a control group read an essay on a neutral topic, the history of neckties.
Druckman concluded that if the Republican party, particularly if they could recruit Trump to be more vocal in endorsing the vaccine, could make a sizable difference in potentially reaching herd immunity. “If there was some way to mobilize them to do that it could be quite effective,” he said.
Endorsement by Democrats resulted in the backlash effect in which Republicans have more negative attitudes toward the vaccine, leading them to be less likely to encourage other people to get the vaccine, the researcher said.
Nathan Walter, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a faculty member in the Center for Communication and Health at Northwestern, said he found Druckman’s research “encouraging because just by changing the source of information you can reduce vaccine hesitancy. This is good news.”
He is a member of Northwestern University's CoVAXCEN, a coalition of academic, government and industry experts on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Walter, whose research involves the evaluation of strategic health messages, said Druckman’s findings can be applied to overcoming hesitancy in the next pandemic.
He said another avenue for research is the “mid-level gatekeepers,” such as social media “influencers” who can have a big impact on attitudes toward vaccines, potentially bigger than that of partisan elites.
Northwestern COVID-19 Vaccine Communication and Evaluation Network (CoVAXCEN) seeks to achieve consensus on a variety of issues related to the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and then produce and disseminate written materials for scientists, healthcare professionals, and the general public describing its conclusions.
Headquartered in the Institute for Global Health's Center for Global Communicable and Emerging Infectious Diseases with the cooperation of the Center for Communication and Health, we seek to achieve consensus on a variety of issues related to the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and then produce and disseminate written materials for scientists, healthcare professionals, and the general public describing its conclusions.
Howard Wolinsky is a Chicago-based freelance medical writer and author. He is the former medical reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He has won awards for medical writing from the American Public Health Association, the American Bar Association, and the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award (“the Chicago Pulitzer''). The Sun-Times twice nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize.