The Gender Gap Reversed : Political Consumerism as a Women-Friendly Form of Civic and Political Engagement

Abstract

a This project would not have been possible without the tremendous support from Dr. Marc Hooghe (Vrije University Brussels), who contributed to earlier versions of this draft and who has been solely responsible for the data collection in Belgium. Both authors thank him for his efforts and stimulating conceptual discussions. While some authors express concern about the decline of traditional forms of social capital and civic engagement in Western democracies, others are more sanguine about the rise of new forms of participation and social interaction, and about the challenge created by the emergence of a new generation of “critical citizens”. Still others argue that social capital and participation research has missed some important areas of civic engagement in which women have been traditionally very active. Thus far, these new or “undiscovered ” forms of civic engagement have been mainly studied as cases and hardly ever utilized survey research. In this paper we focus on a phenomenon that we label ”political consumerism”, i.e. the buying or boycotting of products and services based on political or ethical values. Using a pilot survey among 1,015 Canadian, Swedish and Belgian students and case study material we show that political

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