Abstract
Recent trends indicate diminishing public engagement with formal electoral politics in many advanced liberal democracies, especially among the younger generations. However, evidence also suggests that there has been a simultaneous interest by many young citizens in political consumerism. In large part, this interest is shaped as a response to the individualisation and strict ‘economism’ driven by the underlying forces of neoliberalism. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the seeming incapacity of the purely political sphere to respond to their individualised claims, and having internalised the neoliberal critique of democracy, these young empowered citizen-consumers often search for the ‘political’ within the bounds of the marketplace and are increasingly attracted to consumerist methods of political participation, such as boycotting and buycotting. Given the susceptibility of political consumerism to a neoliberal modus operandi, the lack of available literature problematising its emergence as a response to neoliberal principles is somewhat surprising. The present article will address this gap by connecting the declining levels of electoral participation among younger generations in post-crisis Europe to the rise of political consumerism within the neoliberal ideological hegemony of the ‘marketopoly’. We distinguish between two antithetical, but complimentary effects. Firstly, the internalised neoliberal critique of democracy emphasises the ‘push’ out of the public into the commercial sphere. Secondly, the emerging individualisation of modern ‘liquid’ politics advanced by the postmaterialist sensitivities of young people’s previously affluent socialisation call attention to the existence of a parallel ‘pull’ effect into the ‘marketopoly’, as a habitus of youth political participation. In both cases, the reorganisation of political participation as consumption, and the re-styling of young citizens as ‘empowered’ consumers, delineates political consumerism as an efficacious response to their political disengagement in an increasingly marketised world.
Highlights
Youth politics has gained momentum as an academic field across several social sciences disciplines since the turn of the new millennium [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Previous research indicates that political consumerism is primarily a tool of young postmaterialists, who are distrustful of political institutions [84]
Findings from Stolle et al [84] indicate that political consumerism is primarily a tool of those who are distrustful of political institutions, and expresses an essentially individualistic form of civic action, reiterating the ‘push’ element of the neoliberal critique of democracy
Summary
Youth politics has gained momentum as an academic field across several social sciences disciplines since the turn of the new millennium [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Inglehart’s postmaterialism thesis [20,21,22] provides an influential and complimentary interpretation, placing emphasis on the reorientation of individual and civic values which has led in turn to a widening of the available repertoire of political action In such a context, political consumerism (which consists of buycotting and boycotting products for political, ethical, or environmental reasons) has been proposed as a relatively new form of political participation [23], which moves away from the traditional definitions of electoral participation by harnessing individual consumer power and directing it towards collective public issues. We will commence our analysis by laying out the grounds for the emergence of the neoliberal rationale, and how by shaping the convergence of the previously distant notions of citizen and consumer, it gave rise to a set of ‘push’ factors away from traditional political engagement
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