Abstract
This chapter explores why involvement in buycotting and boycotting reveals varying patterns across countries. Based on a study of 20 European democracies, the author shows that the different development of boycotting and buycotting is closely related to the degree to which guidelines are available which provide citizens with information about the political background of their purchasing options, namely, labelling schemes and/or a firm’s involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The comparative dominance of either of the two types of guidelines shows to be linked to the way in which coordination problems in interactions are typically solved in a country, or ‘concept of the state’. The study thus illustrates that the mechanism of why boycotting and buycotting develop unequally across countries is related to macro-societal patterns in attitudes and the availability of CSR and labelling schemes.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Consumption is not only influenced by the gross disposable income of private households. Also, the relative inclination of the citizens to consume their income is important. Therefore, all models include as a third control variable the net private households’ saving rate (data for the year 2003; OECD 2012).
- 3.
Specifically, the bonds are expected to be different when comparing the countries at a particular point in time. The framework built up here concentrates on such a point-in-time comparison. Nevertheless, when comparing the progress of boycotting vis-à-vis CSR and labelling schemes across time, the theory would expect that countries with an equivalent concept of the state followed a similar course of development. Therefore, in a time-series analysis, CSR and/or labelling schemes would be expected to exhibit a comparable, general pattern of development in relation to boycotting.
- 4.
The result becomes more expressive when disregarding the two outliers (Pearson’s r = 0.593, p < 0.01; 2-tailed).
- 5.
In line with this observation, the correlation coefficient between non-political consumerism and being involved in boy- and buycotting is very high and negative (r = −0.968, p < 0.01). In contrast, the correlation of non-political consumerism and being involved in only boycotting is weaker (r = −0.679, p < 0.01), whereas the correlation coefficient with buycotting only is similar (r = −0.914, p < 0.01). Boycotting and non-political consumerism are thus not ‘opposite poles’ of involvement. Instead, boycotting appears to be a one step followed by ‘something else’, which may be the (additional) involvement in buycotting.
- 6.
The hierarchical cluster analyses rely on Ward’s Method. Beginning with 20 clusters with each comprising one ‘member’ (i.e. country), the method joins countries step by step according to proximities (i.e. similarities). At each merger of two clusters, the aim is to keep the increase of within-cluster sum of squared errors minimal. The clustering process is terminated as soon as a subsequent merger implies a sudden ‘jump’ in distance coefficients (see Everitt et al. 2010). To equalise the effect of the variables measured on different scales, the method uses z-score standardisation of the variables and squared Euclidian distances as the measure (see Brosius 1998, 695–7 and 715).
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Zorell, C.V. (2019). Political Consumerism at the Country Level. In: Varieties of Political Consumerism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91047-5_4
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