Between Voluntary Vaccination Compliance and Mandates: Conceptualising Coercive Mobilisation in a Western context

Scholarship on vaccination policy and governance pays close attention to how governments promote high vaccine uptake. Government-imposed vaccine mandates are the predominant instrument of interest, but recent scholarship on authoritarian regimes has focused on how additional policy actors, including e.g. members of local Communist Party committees, apply various additional pressures on individuals to vaccinate, including in the absence of an official national mandate. Meanwhile, recent research from France indicates a high willingness of people to advance the goal of high vaccination uptake by encouraging others to get vaccinated. However, outside of these limited contexts, research on the governance of vaccine uptake has not explored how governments may mobilise social pressure to drive vaccination coverage, how people experience that pressure, and what role this ‘coercive mobilisation’ plays in driving their vaccine acceptance. To address this gap, our study investigates the potential operation of coercive (social) mobilisation to drive vaccine uptake in Western liberal democracies. We draw on evidence from Australia, beginning with conceptual policy analysis examining the mechanisms by which government policies can prompt non-state actors to pressure the unvaccinated. We then analyse data on COVID-19 vaccination behaviour and reported experiences of coercion in a large representative sample of Australian adults (N=4208) to understand the prevalence and sources of vaccine coercion experienced, and the factors associated with coercive mobilisation. We examined the percentage of individuals claiming that they vaccinated due to coercion and specific coercion types across different jurisdictions, and conducted a series of logistic and ordinal regression analyses to examine the factors associated with vaccination due to coercion, as well as specific sources of coercion. A quarter of our participants vaccinated for COVID-19 reported feeling coerced, but more than half reported to have been responding to social pressure in getting vaccinated. Overall, we estimate that 13-15% of people vaccinated because of some form of coercive mobilisation by non-state actors, and in every jurisdiction, people reported ‘the community’ as the strongest source of coercion ahead of employers, family, and friends. The highest degree of social coercion was experienced in New South Wales and Victoria. People were more likely to attribute their vaccination to social coercion when they had lower levels of political trust, or trust in friends and families as sources of vaccination information. In contrast, trusting in social media sources was associated with experiencing increased coercion, as was feeling more connected to community. Higher levels of education and wealth were associated with increased coercion from employers, and younger people and women were consistently more likely to cite coercive mobilisation as a driver for their vaccination; however, we found no significant relationships between jurisdictions having more coercive government vaccine mandate policies and people feeling more socially coerced therein. This work makes an important contribution to the public policy and governance literatures by theorising and exploring the relationship between social pressures and government policies, contributing to an emergent research agenda that expands our understanding of available modes of governance.