An analysis of the relationship between Political Consumerism and Political Attitudes, Morality or Religion.

My research will examine the way social norms and their trends in relevance may shape political consumerism to see if social salience will contribute to individuals acting on their political beliefs in the market. Concordance between political attitudes and political consumerism may also differ across the partisan divide or the authoritarian-libertarian scale. Within political consumerism, immigration will likely be important to right-wing individuals while sustainability and human rights will be more relevant to left-wing individuals.

Political consumerism can be complex and choice-limiting, meaning high moral intensity could be required for consistent political consumerism in line with personal beliefs. Individual differences in the relevance of moral foundations, operationalised with the Moral Foundations questionnaire, may also partially explain the frequency of political consumerism (Graham et al., 2011). Furthermore, the connections between religion and political consumerism may mean sustainable political consumption will be encouraged through religion by utilising the concepts of dominion and sanctity.

Another moderator I will explore is political trust; low trust may lead to suspicion and pessimism about organisations or authorities which could reduce the efficacy of ethical marketing. However, a trust deficit could also inspire individuals to move their civic engagement from the government to the market. Individual differences in hope and perseverance could therefore moderate political consumption in a low-trust political environment. This investigation will be conducted on participants from nations experiencing corruption and civic disillusionment in the global south.

I will initially conduct a minor systematic literature review to ensure I have explored and examined most of the relevant research in this field. I will subsequently explore secondary research to examine large-scale datasets which include information on political consumerism and political attitudes, morality, or religion, such as the World Value Survey (Minkov, 2012). My first stage of primary data collection will involve semi-structured interviews asking individuals about their moral, religious, and political attitudes along with their political consumerism and any disparity between attitudes or behaviours. This will enable me to gather rich qualitative insights exhibiting how individuals feel about political consumerism and to phrase the content of quantitative surveys in an understandable and salient way which maximises construct validity.

After analysing data from the interviews, I will begin to create surveys asking participants about their political consumerism, religion, morality, politics, demographics, and any other potentially relevant moderators. I will measure political consumerism with the newly created Political Consumerism Index which separates the concepts of boycotting and buycotting, while also measuring the frequency of behaviour and feelings of consumer responsibility (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022). These surveys will include political consumerism resulting from real-life events such as climate change or the Ukraine-Russia war. I will create surveys using Qualtrics to then be carried out on Prolific. Analysing the data from these surveys in R may indicate some significant correlations between variables and potential moderators between attitudes and political consumerism. To test the potential causational role of these moderating factors, I will then present participants with scenarios involving consumer choices and moderating variables to see the effect of each potential moderator. These studies will initially be carried out on UK and US populations, before extending the research cross-culturally to measure how political consumerism may interact with different cultural, religious, or political landscapes in the global south.