Popular approval of Covid-19 restrictions is strongly correlated with vaccination rate

Most governments in the world have implemented restrictive measures to ght against the Covid-19 pandemic. Little is known, however, on people’s approval or disapproval of these restrictions, and importantly, on the factors that might contribute to approval. Switzerland might be the only country where citizens voted on Covid-19 restrictive measures by referendum, thereby providing a rare opportunity to assess the extent to which people approve Covid-19 restrictions. Using data from the Swiss authorities, we nd that the percentage of people who approved Covid-19 restrictions by vote strongly positively correlates with the percentage of people vaccinated in the population (r = 0.929, p < 0.0001). This suggests that vaccinated people are more likely to approve Covid-19 restrictions, which raises interesting questions for further research.


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Most governments in the world have implemented restrictive measures to ght against the Covid-19 pandemic, such as quarantines, travel limitations, school closures, vaccination certi cates, etc. 1,2 Little is known, however, on people's approval or disapproval of these restrictions, and importantly, on the factors that might contribute to approval. This is an important limitation since compliance with governmental restrictions is arguably key in preventing the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Switzerland might be the only country where citizens voted (two times as of today) on Covid-19 restrictive measures by referendum 3 , thereby providing a rare opportunity to assess the extent to which people approve Covid-19 restrictions. In particular, the second referendum of 28 November 2021, which concerned, amongst others, the introduction of a vaccination certi cate, was highly debated in Switzerland. It might therefore be used as an indicator of people's degree of approval related to Covid-19 measures perceived as controversial.  Fig. 1). In other words, the higher the vaccination rate, the higher the acceptance of the referendum and related Covid-19 measures.
Speci cally, we nd that an increase of 1 point of percentage in vaccinated persons is associated with an increase of 1.46 point of percentage in approval of the referendum (95% CI = 1.22 to 1.71, R 2 = 0.863). We note that introducing population size 7 and number of registered voters as control variables in regression analysis does not signi cantly change the results. Likewise, no signi cant relationships were found when the number of Covid-19 related hospitalizations or deaths were used as predictor instead of the percentage of people vaccinated.
The observed relationship demonstrates that popular approval or disapproval of Covid-19 restrictive measures might be strongly related to vaccination rate, with populations more vaccinated also more likely to support such measures. This might be explained by a range of factors (political, cultural, individual, psychological), which would be worth to explore in dedicated research.
First, there might simply be an adequation between vaccination behavior and voting behavior, one re ecting the other. This would not be surprising if we consider that vaccination is itself a measure to ght the spread of the pandemic. Hence people who are vaccinated should also be, on average, more likely to accept other (or more extended) measures. Second, both vaccination behavior and voting behavior might partly re ect political a liation. In Switzerland, political parties make voting recommendations to their members for each referendum. For the referendum of 28 November 2021, all major political parties, except the Swiss People's Party (SVP), recommended to vote yes. Taken together, the political parties who recommended to vote yes represent roughly 60 to 70% of all seats at the National Council (i.e., the lower house of the Federal Assembly). This gure is similar to the percentage of people who accepted the referendum (62.02%), and to the percentage of people who were vaccinated in the population at the same time (65.85%). Third, the close relationship between vaccination rate and approval of Covid-19 measures might also be partly explained by cognitive dissonance dynamics. For example, we might consider that although people who are vaccinated are not necessarily approving more (or more extended) measures, they voted yes to maintain adequation between their vaccination behavior