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Response to Richard Locke’s review of Political Consumerism: Global Responsibility in Action.

What are the possibilities for effective political participation beyond the ballot box? Who participates in these nontraditional activities and how do they relate to more conventional forms of politics? Can individual citizens, as consumers, address some of the great challenges associated with globalization (e.g., child labor, poor wages, environmental degradation) through their purchasing decisions? These are the key questions analyzed in the excellent new book, Political Consumerism, by Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti. These same questions have been debated for years, especially as various market-based forms of activisms (e.g., fair trade certification, antisweatshop campaigns) have grown in recent years. But this is the first comprehensive analysis of the individuals behind these movements. On the basis of 10 years of research, blending together surveys, case studies, archival research, interviews, and the content analysis of an email exchange that reached more than 10 million people throughout the world, Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti show convincingly that individuals, as consumer-citizens, do make purposeful choices in their every day lives—choices that have the potential to shape the attitudes and behaviors of fellow citizens, civil society groups, and even the corporations they target in their campaigns. The underlying premise of the book is that a combination of factors—declining citizen trust in their government, growing complexity of societal problems, and the limited regulatory reach and capacities of governments to address these increasingly complex global problems—has led to a new form of politics based not on traditional (government-centric) forms of authority and accountability but, rather, on the taking of individualized responsibility by citizens as consumers. The authors are clear that this new form of politics does not hold for all sociopolitical problems nor is it equally prevalent in all advanced postindustrial democracies. But, “[w]hereas governments and conventional political institutions might not be able or willing to adequately address various current global problems, some citizens invent and create new approaches and solutions to global-problem solving and take over responsibility themselves” (p. 25). The focus of the book is on describing and analyzing some of these ”new approaches” (e.g., boycotts, buycotts, lifestyle choices, and discursive political consumerism) that individual citizens as consumers pursue to influence corporations and thus address some of the problems that arise as a result of global production systems. Contrary to Robert Reich who argued in his 2007 book Supercapitalism that individuals are torn between their obligations as citizens and their appetites as consumers, Stolle and Micheletti show that it is precisely through everyday acts like shopping that individuals exercise their citizenship rights and express their political preferences. The authors build their case for citizen-consumers by first analyzing various social surveys (e.g., World Values Survey, European Social Survey, and two Swedish surveys) to illustrate the remarkable growth of citizens who express their political and moral concerns vis-à-vis global problems and who report that they act on these concerns through boycotts or buycotts (privileging “ethical” products or producers with their purchasing choices). Of course, what people say and what they actually do is not always the same, and the authors admit that a “30:3 syndrome” (where 30% of survey respondents report certain views but only 3% actually act on these attitudes) exists. Nonetheless, the data presented in Chapters 2–4 of this book are quite impressive. Across several European countries and even in the United States, a plurality, and in some countries an outright majority of respondents, report that they care about the social and environmental conditions under which the products they buy are made, and that they have engaged in boycotts (less often buycotts) to express these concerns. Who are these consumer-citizens? According to the analyses presented by Stolle and Micheletti, political consumers are primarily women, middle-aged (between 30 and 44) and employed people living in urban centers. They are more highly educated than nonpolitical consumers. Political consumers are more prevalent in Protestant as opposed to Catholic communities, and in countries with legacies of neocorporatism and high levels of social equality and social capital. Interestingly enough, political consumers are not extreme or fringe in their