Tag Archives: trust

Russian vaccine hesitancy and the paradox of state-society relations

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Vaccine poster in a Moscow citizen service centre – ‘The Risk of Infection Remains: make an informed decision and get vaccinated’

Russia will likely maintain its statistically dubious plateau of around 800 deaths a day for some time. This will mean that Russia will become the world ‘leader’ in deaths per million people (around six). The other leaders are Mexico and South Africa with similar figures. The USA is rapidly increasing from over three deaths per million at the moment. Most large European countries have fewer than two deaths per million at the moment. Germany and Denmark have 0.2 deaths/million. It might even be much worse – Demographer Raksha – said at the beginning of August that perhaps 2400 people a day were dying of Covid in Russia.

I’ve been meaning to come back to the topic of Covid for some time. I wrote two posts on it early on in 2020. One asking whether social solidarity and state mobilization would help ameliorate the pandemic in Russia.  And another in May 2020 about the need to avoid over-simplifying public attitudes and ‘lay normativity’. I didn’t mention vaccine hesitancy there, but it’s clearly the major issue now in terms of public health in Russia. [See also this great BBC article for an anthropological take on distrust]

Here’s my quick take based on two months of being around people – both vaccinated and unvaccinated – in Moscow and Kaluga region.

  1. Russians are no different from anyone else: hesitancy ‘decays’ once people encounter others (usually family, friends and colleagues) who don’t turn zombie/alien/corpses/infertile after getting a jab. However, because of lower generalized social trust in Russia, this decay might be slower than elsewhere.
  2. Unlike elsewhere, there is an occupational and employment vaccine ‘divide’ in Russia – many people in jobs that don’t force them to get a jab continue to resist – a lot of the time as much due to ‘principle’ than fear (more on that below). These are homemakers (women score higher on hesitancy), pensioners, people working in the informal economy, but also workers in smaller companies – many of which are afraid of using duress on employees.
  3. Getting a high threshold of vaccinated people will be hard because of both 1 and 2. That, and the dominance of Delta variant in Russia and the coming ‘fourth wave’, means the demographic hit will continue: more than half a million people will have died of Covid by the end of 2021 in Russia. Many others will have died because of a lack of access to medical care for other conditions (I personally know of two people in this category in 2021 already). As Nick Trickett points out, demographic effects have economic and social implications.

While I telegraphed in earlier posts that the main thing in Russia was the (in)coherence of the state’s response to Covid, what I failed to account for was the very thing I’m working on in a side project: the complex nature of trust and distrust among Russians towards the state. Now, as I said, hesitancy is decaying strongly everywhere, and Russia is like in France in that respect – high initial hesitancy now falling. However, when people tell me they won’t get jabbed, they all say different things, but digging down and pressing them, they all express a desire to make their own choices, avoid being forced into doing something that might be risky/unnecessary/a hassle.

I quote (nenormativnaia leksika!):

‘The Russian state gives me nothing. If it suddenly wants me to do something: fuck them on principle!’

‘The state cannot organise an adequate response to basic things like potholes and recycling. Suddenly in a short time they made a safe vaccine? There must be something dodgy about the jab.’

‘I don’t want any shit in my arm that comes from god-knows-where – some shithole [mukhosransk] beyond the Urals and tested in a hurry on monkeys.’

‘You know, when I try to get something simple done like a passport renew it’s such a pain in the arse. Just the thought of interacting with a vaccine centre reminds me of all the crap one has to go through with our state. I don’t want to do it. Why should I have to! I don’t want to have anything to do with them if I can help it’

‘The boss wants us all to get it, but he’s afraid of us quiting. I’m not going to do it. We all got sick last winter and have anti-bodies. Why the hell should I do something that’s unnecessary like that?’

I know I am like a stuck record on this, but vaccine hesitancy at least partly reflects one of my core themes – the paradox of Russians’ view of the state: on the one hand, many want a socially interventionist state that protects them from harm (and protects them from the more coercive parts of the state itself!). On the other, they know its limitations, and moreover, they know too well the potential dangers of interacting with what is a fickle and rather callous bureaucratic machine (perhaps no more so than many Western states, if we’re honest).

To wrap up, here’s an interesting study that among other things compares hesitancy between the USA and Russia. Some things of note: hesitancy was higher in Russia (to January 2021) than the USA, and higher than in some other middle-income countries. Russian women especially were hesitant in comparison with US women (so were Russian men, but the baseline hesitancy for women was worse). Educated Russians were just as hesitant as others, whereas in the US there’s a pronounced difference depending on education.

Perhaps even more interestingly, when we get to survey data explaining the hesitancy, it’s noticeable that there is a lack of data in the data about ‘why’ people are hesitant. In contrast to the USA, where side effects are feared, Russians fail to give an unequivocal ‘why’ response. As readers will know, I would argue this is an artefact of the methodological shortcomings of surveys themselves. But it’s also about how rejection (not hesitancy) of the vaccine reflects complex feelings and rationalisations that are hard to articulate and which have multiple causes.  Even for the US, rejection in 50% of cases is due to ‘other issues’. On the other hand, for Russians, “family and friends” are key positive motivators for moving from rejection to acceptance.

What’s not captured in this survey data is the problem of hesitancy among health workers being transmitted to lay persons – a clear problem in Russia. High uptake requires the continual maintenance of ‘social proof’ of vaccine safety and efficacy. At the moment, some health workers as well as the ordinary ‘rejecters’ make the achievement of a high threshold of take-up a far from foregone conclusion.  

Social trust and the problem of the ‘stranger’

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I’m lucky enough to be starting a new project on social trust ‘comparing’ two polar ‘opposites’ – Denmark and Romania. (A good illustration of the difference is found in this LSE blog post by Zsolt Boda and Gergő Medve-Bálint). While I’m familiar enough with some approaches to trust and social capital and their problems, as a way of starting a conversation with my two project partners (one researcher working on Denmark and one on Romania) we are all reading Eric Uslaner’s new edited book: The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust (2018). I thought I’d share here my initial thoughts – partly shaped by my existing prejudices. These prejudices and ‘hunches’ (that it’s highly problematic to think of Scandi societies as ‘high trust’ and postsocialist societies as ‘low trust) inform my reading that follows.

What’s the middle-ground/field of social trust?

Right at the beginning of Ch 1, Uslaner sets up a tension within the conceptualisation of trust relating to the ‘other’ – the person whom is trusted. Overall, what I take away from the first few chapters is the ‘gap’ between relatively clear understandings of kin-trust and complete stranger trust. Most of our meaningful transactional and reciprocal interactions take place between these intimate-stranger poles. The methods outlined and the conceptual framing don’t easily accommodate that ‘gap’ (although it appears there is some good stuff on welfare state/bureaucrat interactions elsewhere in the volume).  I’m most interested in the Street-Level Bureaucrats–supplicant relationship and was thinking of that most of the time I was reading.

Is particularised trust really defined clearly enough?

Later the problem of really defining a standard meaning of particularlised trust occurs. Particularised trust relates to ‘only people like ourselves’ (p.4), but for me that doesn’t square with all that we know from the literature on social networks and patron-client relationships from the former socialist countries where ‘trust’ networks can be highly diverse, especially in terms of power gradients. What does ‘like ourselves’ even mean? Later on in the book we discover that Scandi students have trouble linking ‘other people’ as an abstract concept to concretised ‘strangers’ (unsurprisingly) (p. 22). Yet here, I’m really bugged by ‘ourselves’ as a meaningful unit of analysis in social science. (On p. 4 the actual phrase is ‘Particularised trust is faith only in people like yourself’). My contemporaneous notes show that I wondered whether this meant that social hierarchy, ‘capital’ and status would be a meaningful interpretation here. Does this mean we can’t separate particularised trust from forms of power? Later, in the chapter on measuring trust, the problem with existing survey questions to measure generalised trust is illustrated when it is revealed that at least in some cases ‘most people’ (meant as a proxy for strangers) actually elicits associations like ‘friends’, ‘neighbours’, acquaintances, colleagues, etc. This for me really underlines the problem. Who is a stranger? If there are only ‘relative’ degrees of distance between the people we think of in terms of trusting, then should we not be collapsing particular and general? Or instead, limiting our knowledge claims or investigations to much narrower or clearly defined encounters?

How does change occur?

pp.4-5 Uslaner sets up inverse relationship between particularised and generalised s trust. Also proposes his own position of stable socialisation based trust as a general disposition. In contrast trust in rational choice models is ephemeral.  Also he sets out the debunked, but still widely assumed, link between democracies and trust, which was then replaced by the more nuanced connection between income equality and trust. Overall the next tension I observe from this is the problem of prediction and change. If Uslaner’s trust is mainly early socialisation then how does change in trust occur? Or is this a secondary effect of increasing equality? It isn’t really clear, and I guess that actually Denmark would probably show the opposite – that it’s always been high trust and that increasing or decreasing levels of income equality have had little effect (also noting that income equality is itself a very narrow and rather misleading measure of equality overall). Thinking about more familiar territory – the observation that Russia and other postsocialist countries become ‘low generalised social trust’ societies after communism (ok maybe earlier as well), then again, the lack of change in the model would mean accounting for this is difficult, isn’t it? And in any case I think empirically it is difficult to generalise and say that, e.g., the USSR was a low generalised social trust society before 1991. If anything, in terms of ‘stranger-stranger’ interactions, I think you can quite easily argue the opposite. (I’m aware of the work on how Stalinism led to a long-term breakdown in trust in institutions, but that’s different from ‘generalised trust’ – which kind of illustrates the problem).

trust levels based on survey data

Interpersonal trust levels as measured by the World Values Survey and European Values Study, and the European Social Survey and Afrobarometer Survey – Inglehart & Welzel (2010) – Changing Mass Priorities: The Link between Modernization and Democracy. Reflections, June 2010, Vol. 8/No. 2. as cited in https://ourworldindata.org/trust

 

Optimism and the psycho-social(?) trap

Thinking a bit more about Uslaner’s own preference for early-socialisation and a resulting general trusting disposition, I can’t help thinking about the only relative utility of this in terms of social science. Indeed, reading his account I couldn’t help thinking that ‘optimism’ in general might be a better definition of what he means by ‘general social trust’. Especially as he insists it is hard wired and relatively resistance to change – I guess a kind of psycho-social trait. Overall, then, the generalised model Uslaner favours seems to me only vaguely useful in terms of a general proxy for long-term social stability and ‘well-functioning’ societies. I.e. they are more likely to produce in aggregate optimistic (open and trusting) people. Here we get to Denmark again.

As an aside, Uslaner highlights the problematic causal relationship between associational life in a place and trust (it only seems to work in highly historically/socially specific places like the US).

What is a transactional encounter between strangers?

Next up, if generalised trust is about encounters and expectations of strangers we have to ask, how similar are our daily transactional encounters with strangers – do we treat all ‘strangers’ the same? Are our expectations the same of the fast-food server, the garage mechanic, the call-centre operator at an airline, the doctor’s surgery nurse, the bus driver? Most, if not all our ‘stranger encounters’ are mediated through either corporations or the state. This rather obvious observation isn’t really acknowledged, at least in the ‘Approaches’ first Part of the book. I’m hoping that we learn more in the chapter on Trust and the Welfare State by Steffan Kumlin, Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen and Atle Haugsgjerd.

On the other hand on p. 8 Uslaner notes that one key variable linked to high generalised social trust is quality of institutions – again for me indicating the need to really examine the ‘everyday’ functioning of those insts. through looking at the variability or consistency of citizen-SLB encounters. ‘Institutional trust’ isn’t quite what I mean, as the interaction is at a sub-level and in any case is variable between institutions, even between ‘branches’ of institutions – think about how one’s encounter with criminal justice ‘institutions’ would be quite variable between, say, community police liaison officer, beat cop in a city, emergency line staff (who may be partially privatised and in a remote location), local courts, etc.

Overall, I can see myself arguing strongly for a more interactionalist forms of measuring trust that are sensitive to power gradients, and the leverageable and performable forms of ‘social capital’ that one can bring to an encounter – particularly with an SLB. These would include diverse aspects as class, articulation of needs and rights through educated speech, race, gender, age, etc. But then would this be best described as social capital?