Varieties of political consumerism

Abstract

There is not one type of political consumer but several, and citizens seem to make a distinction between them. But why are boycotter not automatically buycotter, and vice-versa? The dissertation investigates to what extent citizens' understanding of how cooperation between government, firms and civil society should look like influences their preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) compared to labelling schemes, and how this together influences the decision to boycott and/or to buycott. Drawing on a cross-country study of 20 European countries and a survey conducted among 1.350 individual citizens living in Germany, the study shows that boycotting and buycotting represent two opposite and yet complementary modes of political consumerism, which together constitute a process that develops in parallel and interacting with the availability of political shopping guidelines. The comparative importance of labelling schemes and CSR for political consumerism in turn varies across countries depending on the prevailing understanding of cooperation.