Estimating the size of "anti-vax" and vaccine hesitant populations in the US, UK, and Canada: comparative latent class modeling of vaccine attitudes.

Vaccine hesitancy is a significant impediment to global efforts to vaccinate against the SARS-CoV-2 virus at levels that generate herd immunity. In this article, we show the utility of an inductive approach - latent class analysis (LCA) - that allows us to characterize the size and nature of different vaccine attitude groups; and to compare how these groups differ across countries as well as across demographic subgroups within countries. We perform this analysis using original survey data collected in the US, UK, and Canada. We also show that these classes are strongly associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination intent and perceptions of the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that attitudes about vaccines to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic are well explained by latent vaccine attitudes that precede the pandemic. More specifically, we find four substantive classes of vaccine attitudes: strong supporters, supporters with concerns, vaccine hesitant, and "anti-vax" as well as a fifth measurement error class. The strong "anti-vax" sentiment class is small in all three countries, while the strong supporter class is the largest across all three countries. We observe different distributions of class assignments in different demographic groups - most notably education and political leaning (partisanship and ideology).

Some people just want to watch the world burn: the prevalence, psychology and politics of the 'Need for Chaos'.

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to 'want to watch the world burn'. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Party identification, local context, and Australian attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy.

The acceptance of newcomers as either immigrants or asylum seekers has been a recurring issue in Australian politics. Both the size of Australia's intake of economic migrants and the resettlement of asylum seekers held offshore have been contentious political issues. Research in other immigrant-receiving countries has identified numerous factors shaping attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy. These include political factors (such as party identification) and local demographic context - both immigrant concentration and change in immigrant concentration over time. Still, few studies of Australia have considered the effects of genuinely local demographic context, or how local context moderates the effects of political factors on attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy. Drawing on survey data from the Australian Election Study (2010-2016) and local-level census data, this article advances an explanation of Australians' attitudes toward immigration and asylum policy centring on the roles of party identification, local demographic context, and their interaction.

Enlisting the support of trusted sources to tackle policy problems: The case of antimicrobial resistance.

Antimicrobial resistance represents one of the world's most pressing public health problems. Governments around the world have-and will continue to-develop policy proposals to deal with this problem. However, the capacity of government will be constrained by very low levels of trust in government. This stands in contrast to 'medical scientists' who are highly trusted by the public. This article tests to what extent trusted sources can alter attitudes towards a policy proposal to regulate the use of antibiotics. We find that respondents are much more likely to support a policy put forward by 'medical scientists.' This article provides some initial evidence that medical scientists could be used to gain support for policies to tackle pressing policy challenges such as AMR.

The Distribution of Climate Change Public Opinion in Canada.

While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) approach, we estimate opinion in federal electoral districts and provinces. We demonstrate that a majority of the Canadian public consistently believes that climate change is happening. Belief in climate change's causes varies geographically, with more people attributing it to human activity in urban as opposed to rural areas. Most prominently, we find majority support for carbon cap and trade policy in every province and district. By contrast, support for carbon taxation is more heterogeneous. Compared to the distribution of US climate opinions, Canadians believe climate change is happening at higher levels. This new opinion data set will support climate policy analysis and climate policy decision making at national, provincial and local levels.

Party Identification, Contact, Contexts, and Public Attitudes toward Illegal Immigration.

Illegal immigration is a contentious issue on the American policy agenda. To understand the sources of public attitudes toward immigration, social scientists have focused attention on political factors such as party identification; they have also drawn on theories of intergroup contact to argue that contact with immigrants shapes immigration attitudes. Absent direct measures, contextual measures such as respondents' ethnic milieu or proximity to salient geographic features (such as borders) have been used as proxies of contact. Such a research strategy still leaves the question unanswered - is it contact or context that really matters? Further, which context, and for whom? This article evaluates the effects of party identification, personal contact with undocumented immigrants, and contextual measures (county Hispanic population and proximity to the US-Mexico border) on American attitudes toward illegal immigration. It finds that contextual factors moderate the effects of political party identification on attitudes toward illegal immigration; personal contact has no effect. These findings challenge the assumption that contextual measures act as proxies for interpersonal contact.