Boycotting

Under what conditions do individuals who profess to boycott products align actual and intended consumption habits? Inconsistency between self-reported participation and practice can help explain why few boycott campaigns harm targets despite high political consumption rates reported in surveys of Americans and Europeans. Arab boycotts are fertile yet unexplored settings in which to assess this proposition. Using data from 820 Algerian students surveyed after the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, we evaluate whether boycotters are more likely than others to weigh country-of-origin in preferences for soda, clothing, and mobile phones. Almost 60% claimed to boycott US goods – consistent with cross-national survey rates and a 2007 nationally representative survey of 800 Algerians – but fewer respondents expressed actual brand preferences consistent with this desire. We extend the political consumption literature by expanding its geographic scope and elaborating a mechanism by which product characteristics minimize or magnify collective action problems that undermine participation. Our results suggest that political consumers are more likely to maintain boycott behavior when targeting substitutable goods linked closely to identity (symbolic and visible), thereby reducing direct and information costs and enabling social network enforcement.

This paper investigates why “positive” political consumers (i.e. buycotters) are not automatically “negative” political consumers (i.e. boycotters), too. The analysis of the European Social Survey 2002/03, for example, reveals a different pattern of buycotting and boycotting across countries. Similarly, the spread of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and labeling schemes is somewhat different across countries and thus the spread of the two main sources of information on political, environmental or social matters in consumption. This suggests that citizens’ decision to use their consumption as a tool for expressing political concerns interacts differently with CSR compared to labeling schemes, and across countries.
CSR embodies the taking over of responsibility of firms in cooperation with other actors of civil society and the state. In contrast, labeling schemes serve as tools to influence demand for specific products and thus embody a culture that favors market-driven, formal solutions. In view of that, the paper examines whether the discrepancy is due to citizens’ “concept of the state”, that is to say, their attitudes concerning the state, the market and civil society and their view about who is responsible for what, how the cooperation between the three actors should look like and which role each of them should take over.
The findings propose a framework according to which, on the country level, boycotting brings about the “landscape” in which buycotting becomes possible. It puts “bad” companies under pressure to change their practices and thereby generates the information required for buycotting. In this process, the concept of the state influences individual citizens’ preferences for either CSR or labeling schemes. And depending on which of the two they want to promote, citizens may rather prefer to engage in a boycott or a buycott. Accordingly, the development of political consumerism and its overall extent are different across countries depending on the prevailing concept of the state.

Arab boycotts of American products intensified after 9-11. Scholarly neglect of this form of political action reflects an assumption that people do not change buying habits for political causes. Many studies of political consumption view it as a phenomenon of advanced democracies. We propose hypotheses about why and under what circumstances it occurs in the Middle East, observing that consumption is an important form of participation where formal channels are closed or grievances are directed toward an external actor. We argue that consumer activism against such targets is often weak because people boycott only symbolic, substitutable, and socially visible commodities that minimize information costs and maximize social network enforcement. People with positive views about one or more aspects of the target also are unlikely to sustain boycott behavior. We test our propositions with data from a survey of 800 Algerian students, conducted at the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The democratic boundary problem raises the question of who has democratic participation rights in a given polity and why. One possible solution to this problem is the all-affected principle (AAP), according to which a polity ought to enfranchise all persons whose interests are affected by the polity’s decisions in a morally significant way. While AAP offers a plausible principle of democratic enfranchisement, its supporters have so far not paid sufficient attention to economic participation rights. I argue that if one commits oneself to AAP, one must also commit oneself to the view that political participation rights are not necessarily the only way, and not necessarily the best way to protect morally weighty interests. I also argue that economic participation rights raise important worries about democratic accountability, which is why their exercise must be constrained by a number of moral duties.

International law affirms human rights treaty obligations to subnational government institutions that have both local and  extraterritorial dimensions. Democratic movements in cities have produced a community of practice that clarifies the meaning of global human rights consideration while governing locally.

This book provides an analysis of the politics of consumption and how the ‘educated consumer’ plays a vital role in advancing responsible market practices and consumption. Based on a comprehensive interdisciplinary perspective, it explores the extent, drives and links of boycotting, buycotting, labelling schemes and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in 20 European countries. A central question addressed is whether macro-societal patterns of orientation concerning the roles of the state, companies and citizens can explain individual and cross-national differences in boycotting and buycotting. As the book shows, there is not one type of ‘political consumer’, but several, and their occurrence is directly connected to national variations of labelling schemes and Corporate Social Responsibility. Consumers need reference points and information on the political backgrounds of purchases, and policy makers must address that need through political measures which fit to the national patterns in views about cooperation and market relationships.

Do consumers  have  any  kind  of  real countervailing  power in  the  age  of  neoliberal globalisation ?  A  new  book analyses  the  political role of  boycotting  and  of  exercising
economic power “from below”.
Reviewed : Ingrid Nyström, Patricia Vendramin, Le boycott, Paris, Presses de SciencesPo, 2015, 135 p., 13€.