Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy and its implications for democracy: Vaccine-critical parties and their electoral success in the 2022 parliamentary elections and the 2023 provincial elections in South Tyrol
With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, the subsequent protective measures, which included restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly, and finally the Green Pass as a prerequisite for access to many areas of social life, the South Tyrolean no-vax scene gained further momentum. This can be seen in the election results of the 2022 parliamentary elections and the 2023 provincial elections, where the Vita and JWA lists, both primarily anti-vaccination and anti-protection measure platforms, scored strongly in some South Tyrolean municipalities. What is the political potential of vaccination critics in South Tyrol, where are they particularly strong geographically, and what are the characteristics of the strongholds of the no-vax movement? What are the central points of their political representatives, are there any other characteristics besides vaccine hesitancy that these parties have in common? Where do the conspicuously high levels of vaccine skepticism and hostility towards science in South Tyrol come from, and can parallels be drawn with other linguistic and cultural areas? This article aims to provide an initial attempt to answer these and other questions. The political relevance and long-term establishment of the anti-vaccine movements, especially in the newly elected South Tyrolean provincial parliament, can probably only be explained more precisely in retrospect. Nevertheless, the link between vaccine hesitancy and voting behavior offers a first promising starting point for an investigation of the connection between health science and political issues such as health literacy, political participation and voting behavior.