Biography:

Cesi Cruz is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works on topics at the intersection of political science and economics, including elections, misinformation, gender and inclusive development. Her research is based on fieldwork in Cambodia and the Philippines and combines social network analysis, surveys, and field experiments. Her work has been published in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, Economic Journal, and Comparative Political Studies.

Cesi is a board member of Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP), the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE), and Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC). In addition, she serves on the executive board of Women Also Know Stuff, an organization to promote women’s scholarship in political science. Her projects and working papers are available on her website: www.cesicruz.com .

Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy In Polarized Societies

Abstract:

Governments attempting to encourage their citizens to take socially beneficial but individ- ually costly actions face strong challenges, especially in polarized societies. We designed interventions to make citizens reflect on the personal and social benefits of vaccination and implemented a survey experiment on a sample of 1,900 Filipinos in May 2021, around the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the Philippines. Using data collected a year later, we find that treated individuals received their first dose earlier. Those effects are large: treated individuals were 5.3 percentage-points more likely to receive their first dose within a month of the first survey, compared with a control group mean of 2.1 percent. Individuals who were positive about vaccination at baseline respond more strongly to the treatments, suggesting that the interventions motivated and encouraged individuals to become vaccinated, rather than persuading people who were against vaccination to become vaccinated. In fact, these strong positive short term effects mask important negative effects among the sample of individuals who were not planning to be vaccinated at baseline: the treatments had small negative effects on the likelihood of being vaccinated at endline.