Is the grass greener on the other side? Benchmarking Covid-19 vaccine procurement against the British experience

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic placed responsibility on the European Union (EU) to effectively mitigate this common challenge. An important aspect of the common fight against the virus was the collective procurement of vaccines. The initially slow process of vaccine delivery may have caused overall frustration within societies and may also have had a profound effect on people’s assessment of their country’s EU membership. This paper examines this assumption via unique panel data collected in Germany in three waves between November 2020 and August 2021. We show that citizens evaluated their country’s EU membership negatively especially when the EU’s progress on vaccinations was in its early stages. In addition, public assessment was particularly negative when vaccination progress was compared to the situation in the United Kingdom (UK). Overall, our findings point to volatile levels of EU support depending on respondents’ perceptions of the success of the UK outside the EU.