Abstract
AbstractMany have depicted a steady rise in lifestyle politics. Individuals are increasingly using everyday life choices about consumption, transportation, or modes of living to address political, environmental, or ethical issues. While celebrated by some as an expansion of political participation, others worry this trend may be detrimental for democracy, for instance, by reducing citizens to consumers. Implicit in this common critique is the notion that lifestyle politics will replace, rather than coexist with or lead to, other forms of political participation. We provide the first detailed longitudinal analysis to test these hypotheses. Using unique panel data from 1538 politically active individuals from the Flemish region of Belgium (2017–18), we demonstrate that over time, lifestyle politics functions as a gateway into institutionalized and non-institutionalized modes of political participation and that this relationship is mediated by individuals’ increased political concerns.
Highlights
Does lifestyle politics alienate people from other forms of political participation or rather lead people to do more activities? This paper aims to add empirical rigour to this longstanding debate about the consequences of a rise in lifestyle politics (Bennett, 1998; Micheletti and Stolle, 2010; Stolle and Micheletti, 2013)
While some assume that lifestyle politics functions as a gateway to other modes of participation, others suggest that it functions as a getaway from them
We find that the more people do lifestyle politics
Summary
Does lifestyle politics alienate people from other forms of political participation or rather lead people to do more activities? This paper aims to add empirical rigour to this longstanding debate about the consequences of a rise in lifestyle politics (Bennett, 1998; Micheletti and Stolle, 2010; Stolle and Micheletti, 2013). We test whether engagement in lifestyle politics leads away from other modes of political participation, or rather to them, as others have suggested Willis and Schor, 2012) We refer to these opposing ideas as the ‘gateway’ (to) and ‘getaway’ (from) hypotheses. Proponents of the gateway hypothesis (e.g. Gotlieb and Wells, 2012; Willis and Schor, 2012; Baumann et al, 2015) argue that (1) people do not have a predefined amount of participatory resources available; (2) lifestyle politics can boost motivations to engage in politics more generally; and (3) LMOs offer
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