Transparent Production Trumps Politics: What Makes People Trust a COVID-19 Vaccine

When COVID-19 vaccines first rolled out, they quickly acquired national labels: the “Chinese vaccine,” the “Russian vaccine,” the “German-American vaccine.” Those labels were never neutral. A new survey experiment from Turkey, published in SN Social Sciences, shows that the political character of a vaccine’s country of origin measurably shapes whether people judge a vaccine safe, effective, and worth taking — but that how openly the vaccine was produced matters even more.

The study, conducted by Kerem Yıldırım of Bilkent University and colleagues at Koç University, the University of Queensland, and the National University of Singapore, set out to disentangle two forces that usually travel together in the real world: the regime type of the country where a vaccine is made, and the transparency of the vaccine’s development and production process. Democracies tend to be more open about scientific data, so a vaccine from a democratic country is usually also a vaccine with a visible production trail. By randomly assigning experimental participants to read descriptions that varied these two attributes independently, the team could isolate which factor actually drives hesitancy.

Turkey offered an ideal laboratory. By early 2021 the country had approved four COVID-19 vaccines from very different political systems: Sinovac’s CoronaVac from China, Russia’s Gamaleya Sputnik V, the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine developed in the United States and Germany, and the domestically produced Turkovac. Vaccination was voluntary, and people could choose among these options. Public debate over their relative merits was intense and politically polarized, sharpened by a media environment in which pro-government outlets dominated and by controversies such as the government’s late-2020 admission that asymptomatic cases had been excluded from official daily case counts.

The experiment itself was elegantly simple. Between October 12 and 27, 2021, 761 participants recruited through quota sampling to mirror the Turkish population in age, education, and sex read one of four short vignettes, each between 59 and 63 words. The vignettes described a COVID-19 vaccine produced in either a democratic or an autocratic country — defined strictly by whether fundamental decisions are made by popularly elected representatives — and developed through either a transparent or an opaque process. Crucially, no real country was named, which prevented pre-existing geopolitical loyalties or animosities from contaminating the results. After reading, participants rated the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness on 11-point scales, stated their willingness to be vaccinated on a 5-point scale, and contributed to an overall support index with strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89).

The results were unambiguous. Vaccines described as coming from democratic countries were rated significantly more safe, more effective, and more acceptable than identical vaccines attributed to autocratic countries. Vaccines described as transparently produced outperformed those with opaque production histories on every measure. When the two factors were compared head to head, transparency emerged as the heavier weight: respondents consistently preferred a transparently produced vaccine from an authoritarian country over an opaquely produced vaccine from a democracy. In statistical terms, when production remained opaque, shifting the country of origin from democratic to autocratic produced its weakest effect on willingness to vaccinate, with a standardized difference of about −0.28, while transparency manipulations produced larger drops across all outcome measures.

These effects survived a battery of controls. The researchers accounted for respondents’ age, sex, and education, their COVID-19 risk perception, their vaccination status, their trust in the World Health Organization, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies, and their support for each of Turkey’s five major political parties. Even after all of this, the experimental effects of regime type and production transparency remained robust across all four dependent variables. The findings also align with a striking macro-level pattern the authors document: among countries using vaccines from both democratic and authoritarian producers, vaccination rates run roughly 12 percentage points lower than in countries relying exclusively on vaccines from one type of regime, suggesting that a mixed vaccine menu may itself breed doubt.

The most theoretically interesting result concerns who responds to political information at all. The team measured each participant’s democratic attitudes using a ten-item index capturing both intrinsic support for democratic procedures and instrumental appreciation of democratic outcomes such as accountability. When this index was interacted with the experimental treatments, a clear moderation pattern appeared. Respondents with strong democratic attitudes were highly sensitive to both regime type and production transparency, distinctly favoring vaccines made openly in democracies. Respondents with weak democratic attitudes, by contrast, were essentially unmoved by either manipulation — neither the political character of the producing country nor the openness of the production process shifted their evaluations.

This asymmetry carries a subtle implication for theories of democratic support. Citizens who value democracy for its own sake anchored their vaccine judgments in the regime itself, treating democratic origin as an encompassing signal of legitimacy. Citizens who value democracy instrumentally — for the accountability and openness it delivers — responded primarily to the transparency cue, which is precisely the output-level quality they prize. The fact that transparency, rather than regime type, dominated overall suggests that for most people the procedural honesty of vaccine development is the more proximate and persuasive signal, even though it is conceptually embedded in the democratic ideal.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. Social desirability pressure could have inflated reported support for democratic and transparent conditions in a pandemic that was intensely moralized, but the use of anonymized vignettes and random assignment protects the comparative causal claims even if absolute levels are somewhat inflated. Manipulation checks also revealed that some participants inferred a country’s democratic character from the transparency of its vaccine development — itself evidence that citizens see openness as part of what democracy means. The team notes a further wrinkle: because traditional and mRNA vaccines happen to be produced in different countries, stated country preferences may partly proxy for vaccine technology preferences.

For public health officials, the practical message is direct. Overcoming hesitancy is not only a matter of asserting scientific efficacy; it requires demonstrable openness about how vaccines are made, tested, and monitored. In polarized settings where domestic institutions are distrusted, the transparency credentials of foreign producers become powerful heuristics that citizens actually use. As the world prepares for future pandemics, the Turkish evidence suggests that investing in open, accountable production processes — and communicating them clearly — may do more to build public confidence than any appeal to numbers alone.

Subject of Research: Survey experiment on how vaccine country-of-origin regime type and production transparency shape COVID-19 vaccine preferences in Turkey

Article Title: Does country of origin matter in COVID-19 vaccine preferences? The role of vaccine transparency and regime type

Article References: Yıldırım, K., Çarkoğlu, A., Baruh, L., Kuru, O., & Cemalcılar, Z. (2026). Does country of origin matter in COVID-19 vaccine preferences? The role of vaccine transparency and regime type. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 551. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01857-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01857-z

Keywords: vaccine hesitancy, COVID-19, country of origin, regime type, transparency, survey experiment, Turkey, democratic attitudes, public health, vaccine preferences, political polarization, Sinovac