Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we are interested in the impact of party- and expert cues on public attitudes. We further expect populist attitudes to be an important indicator of the rejection of compulsory vaccination due to their scepticism towards science. To test these expectations, we rely on a cueing experiment conducted on a sample of 2265 German citizens. We test for the effects of in-party and out-party cues as well as public health expert cues. We find evidence for in-party cues, meaning that respondents adjust their position on this issue in the direction of their most preferred party. Similar results can be found for public health expert cues. However, there is no evidence for out-party cues. Further analyses reveal that support for compulsory vaccinations is not affected by left-right placement directly. Instead, only the combination of right-wing attitudes and populism negatively affects support for compulsory vaccination.

Various studies demonstrate that candidates at the top of the party list have a strong advantage in preferential voting systems, particularly under open-list PR. Such ballot position effects can be explained by voters’ tendency to rely on easily available information shortcuts when selecting a candidate. In this paper, we argue that the strength of ballot position effects depends on the context of how voters cast their vote. Specifically, we argue that postal voters are less likely to rely on the ballot position cue compared to voters who vote on election day for two reasons. First, postal voters might be more politically interested. Second, postal voters have more time to assess additional information about the candidates. The hypothesis is tested by analyzing newly collected data from two open-list PR elections in the German federal state of Hamburg. The results confirm the theoretical expectations: Ballot position effects are substantively weaker among postal voters. Additional analyses suggest that differences in the political interest between postal voters and election day voters are unlikely to fully explain these results. These findings advance our understanding of ballot position effects and voters’ use of information shortcuts more generally.