Political consumption

Abstract

Political consumption is a multidisciplinary phenomenon, that has slowly risen to the awareness of the masses. In this paper, to understand the phenomenon of political consumption as broadly as possible to identify meaningful new information from the body of literature chosen, we have decided to use a broad definition of PC, in which PC is seen as consumption manifestations in relation to political ideologies (Chow et al., 2022). Ideologies behind political consumption can vary from leftist to rightist (Ulver and Laurell, 2020), and they are deeply rooted in the cultural and societal values (Yang et al., 2020) that an individual has acquired through-out their life.

To understad the emergent phenomenon of political consumption (PC) better, we have selected 30 previous academic papers done on political consumerism from highly valued journals, and done a comprehensive bibliometric analysis based on this body of literature. Based on the findings, we have identified four interconnected dimensions of political consumption: (1) contextual enablers, (2) individual and collective PC, (3) motivations driving PC and (4) consumption and anti-consumption actions that manifest political values in practice. With these new identified dimensions, we wish to shed light on how they collectively constitute the phenomenon of political consumption.