Judicial reasoning, individual cultural types, and support for COVID‐19 vaccine mandates

Abstract

With heated political and public debate over government vaccine mandates, COVID‐19 offers an opportunity to better understand the role of policy justifications on people's perceptions towards a policy. Through this study, we aim to move beyond the partisan and ideological arguments for and against vaccine mandates to illustrate how individuals' worldviews, based on Cultural Theory, can better explain why people have different perceptions towards vaccine mandates. Using the judiciary and judicial reasoning as the setting, and controlling for individuals' preexisting opinion on COVID‐19 vaccines, we hypothesize that people who prefer vaccine mandates will agree with judicial reasoning that appeals towards individualistic and hierarchical statements. Additionally, we hypothesize that those who have confidence in the judiciary will agree with individualistic and hierarchical statements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results confirm the hypotheses.

Cultural biases, agenda setting, and the regulation of policy processes

“…As for the fatalistic bias, the authors can only confirm the expected relation for social distancing, not for vaccine mandate. Brough et al (2024) equally tie in with the research interest in the relation between perceptions of vaccine mandates during COVID-19 and cultural worldviews. However, they take a slightly different perspective as they seek to explain what leads respondents to favor certain statements of judicial reasoning presenting different cultural worldviews and how this is a function of both preference for vaccine mandates and confidence in the judiciary.…”