Partisan cues provide a very limited explanation of political differences in intentions to vaccinate against COVID-19 in France

In the past ten years, increasing attention has been paid to the influence of political identities on attitudes towards vaccines. To explain partisan differences in attitudes to vaccines, researchers have tended to focus on a “top-down” approach combining partisan cues and motivated reasoning. In this paper, we study the evolution of intentions to vaccinate against COVID-19 over time by drawing on 34 cross-sectional surveys covering a period of approximately a year and a half (March 2020-June 2021, n=38 416). Across the whole period, people who felt closest to parties on the Far Right, the Far Left and those who felt closest to no party at all were more likely to not intend to vaccinate than people who felt closest to parties on the Left, the Right and at the Center. To explain partisan differences in attitudes to vaccines, researchers have focused on a “top-down” approach combining partisan cues and motivated reasoning. We show that this approach can explain only very partly these results and that it does not pay sufficient attention to disengagement with politics. We conclude by advocating for a better articulation between work on cognitive mechanisms and work on the strategies deployed by partisan organisations to gain followers.