Political and Ethical Consumption

The terms political consumption and ethical consumption (also called political consumerism) are generally interchangeable. The phenomenon is defined as the use of the consumer market for political or ethical purposes. This form of consumption involves considerations that go beyond the traditional economic perspective of the relationship between the price and material quality of consumer goods. It includes such matters as human and workers' rights, gender equality, use of nature and natural resources, animal treatment, relationships between the developed and developing world (so-called North and South dilemmas), and other related topics that concern values about the politics behind products and the politics of consumption. Most of the values involved in political consumption are not readily visible in shelf products. They are made visible in advocacy campaigns conducted by civic groups and now even government and corporations. In some geographical areas, as the United Kingdom, the term ethical consumption is preferred to political consumption because it distinguishes the phenomenon from the consumption of politics as illustrated by the growing use of consumer choice in welfare provision and privatization and the role of market logic in political campaigns.

The term political consumption, or political consumerism, is of rather recent origin and first appeared in Denmark as part of the public debate about the popularity of the Shell boycott over the Brent Spar conflict in 1995. However, the phenomenon itself is centuries old. Over the years, the world has witnessed politically motivated boycotts of a large number of common consumer goods, including tea, sugar, grapes, batteries, cotton, paper, shoes, fruit, coffee, wine, cheese, and computers—and even transportation systems, brand names, corporations, and individual countries. There are also historical instances of campaigns to get people to use their political and moral values to buy designated goods produced in a particular way, that is, so-called buycotts that often rely on labeling schemes to promote certain values. Earlier examples are “no slave” products marketed during the grand antislavery movement of the 1600s to 1800s and the anti-sweatshop “white label” on cotton clothing from the early 1900s. Deliberate choice not to buy certain goods for political and ethical reasons—that is, consumer boycotts—played a vital role in the struggles for colonial independence in America (mid-1700s) and India in the early 1900s. Other important examples are the Montgomery bus boycott (1950s) in the United States, California grape boycott for workers' rights (1960s), the global boycott of South Africa to protest apartheid that started up in the late 1950s, and the Nestlé boycott from the 1970s and continuing today against the marketing of infant formula in the third world. More recently, consumers in the Middle East have boycotted Western corporations, as forcefully illustrated by the boycott of the Danish dairy group Arla, to express their criticism of cartoons featuring caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in 2006 in a Danish newspaper and not criticized strongly by the Danish government. As shown in the anti-Semitic Don't Buy Jewish campaign that gained momentum in Europe in the 1930s and the Ku Klux Klan's activities in the United States to promote racism, political consumption can also threaten democracy and endanger human rights. The less democratic forms of political consumption are difficult to investigate and have not been studied systematically, empirically, or theoretically.

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