Population Health Research Brief Series

Your neighborhood’s politics may influence your own vaccination decisions. This brief describes how residential political climate influenced COVID-19 vaccination decisions among liberals and conservatives.

The authors found that while liberals had low vaccine hesitancy and high vaccine uptake regardless of the politics in their communities, conservatives’ vaccine hesitancy and uptake varied by the political climate of their community. Conservatives living in liberal communities (places with lower shares of the 2020 Presidential vote going to Donald Trump) were more likely to get vaccinated and boosted than conservatives in conservative communities.

The findings suggest that community-level social influence plays a powerful role in vaccination decisions.