Perceiving Freedom: Civil Liberties and COVID-19 Vaccinations
| Author | Hayley Munir,Syed Rashid Munir |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221082460 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Early Results |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221082460
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) 190 –209
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299221082460
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Perceiving Freedom:
Civil Liberties and
COVID-19 Vaccinations
Hayley Munir1 and Syed Rashid Munir2
Abstract
Why have some countries been more successful in their COVID-19 vaccine rollouts than
others? Despite efforts by governments to vaccinate their adult populations against COVID-19,
vaccination rates remain irregularly low in some countries. We suggest that a crucial piece of
this puzzle lies in resistance against government directives from the public due to civil liberty
protections. Countries with greater protections for civil liberties can be expected to have lower
vaccinations administered than countries with fewer protections, as the public enjoys a sense of
freedom regarding their private lives. In such countries, de jure constraints on government policies
are complemented by the fear of public backlash, even in crises; consequently, beyond structural
limitations, governments with high levels of civil liberty protections face an additional hurdle in
managing the COVID-19 crisis. Evidence for this hypothesis is presented for 153 countries by
combining civil liberty scores with newly available data on COVID-19 vaccinations.
Keywords
COVID-19, civil liberties, vaccines
Accepted: 4 February 2022
Even though the novel COVID-19 coronavirus is less lethal than other viral diseases such
as Ebola or Tuberculosis (Callaway et al., 2020), its higher infection rate has caused
catastrophe for individuals and governments all around the globe. While initial research
on the impacts of COVID-19 has been dominated by epidemiology and economics, there
are additional puzzles emerging now whose answers lay squarely within the political
domain.
One such puzzle is the asymmetric success rate enjoyed by governments globally for
their COVID-19 vaccination mandates. After the initial uncertainty around the disease,
the availability of various COVID-19 vaccines has given countries an opportunity to
combat the spread and deadliness of the virus. Yet, in some countries, we observe lower
1Department of Political Science, Albright College, Reading, PA, USA
2Department of Political Science, Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan
Corresponding author:
Syed Rashid Munir, Department of Political Science, Forman Christian College University, Canal Bank Road,
Lahore 54600, Pakistan.
Email: srmunir@gmail.com
1082460PSW0010.1177/14789299221082460Political Studies ReviewMunir and Munir
research-article2022
Early Results
Munir and Munir 191
levels of vaccinations than expected, while controlling for structural factors such as avail-
ability of the vaccine and national wealth. For example, the entire US adult population
had access to COVID-19 vaccines since 19 April 2021 (Reuters, 2021a) but even in
October 2021, only slightly over 60% of the US population had been fully vaccinated
against COVID-19 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021a). In contrast, in
China—the country with the biggest population—vaccination rates were hovering around
80% (Reuters, 2021c) in the same period.
What explains this asymmetry in government success regarding COVID-19 vaccine
rollouts? Factors such as government resources, population size, demographic character-
istics, and so on surely play a role in terms of how well a government can respond to this
crisis, but we suggest that there is a piece of the puzzle here that remains unexplored. In
particular, we contend that protections for civil liberties could explain government suc-
cess—or lack thereof—in implementing COVID-19 vaccine mandates and subsequent
low vaccination rates. Crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, are character-
ized by threat, uncertainty, and time pressure (Lipscy, 2020). In crises, governments
would ideally like to have more discretion available to them to mitigate these three fac-
tors. However, in countries with more civil liberty protections, governments face greater
constraints. In some instances, they are bound by law (i.e. a government cannot violate a
civil liberty guarantee) but they may also be constrained in a de facto manner. These de
facto constraints come from the overwhelming individualism and the sense of freedom
that permeates such societies. In the presence of both formal protections and informal
expectations for individual freedoms, governments cannot readily engage in ad hoc
behavior without facing significant public backlash.
These constraints are crucial in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they make
managing the crisis vastly different in states that have high levels of civil liberty protec-
tions as compared to states that have low levels of such protections. In states with fewer
civil liberty protections, governments can easily issue vaccine directives on an ad hoc
basis without fearing significant public backlash, as formal and informal protections for
civil liberties are rare. While governments without constraints are undesirable, such flex-
ibility is also uniquely useful in crisis situations, as governments can act quickly, deci-
sively, and unilaterally. Consequently, in the case of COVID-19 vaccines, several states
with fewer civil liberty protections—such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia—have
successfully instituted vaccine mandates that have gone unchallenged by the public.
On the contrary, states with robust civil liberty protections find it more challenging to
manage crisis situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, instituting vaccine
mandates on a large scale becomes difficult for such countries. This is the case because
government initiatives run into individualism and perceived constitutional protections,
which creates public backlash. For instance, in Germany, Australia, and the United States,
COVID-19 vaccination requirements have been criticized as government overreach, thus
resulting in the absence of universal vaccine mandates. For this reason, we expect coun-
tries with more civil liberty protections to have lower vaccinations administered overall,
while holding other factors constant. Evidence for this hypothesis is presented for 153
countries by utilizing newly available vaccination data for the first 11 months of the year
2021, which is used as the dependent variable in ordinary least squares (OLS) regression
against civil liberty protection scores. The results suggest that governments with greater
protections for civil liberties may continue to face hurdles in their plans for higher
COVID-19 vaccination rates, even in situations when more vaccinations may be desira-
ble from a public health perspective.
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