POLITIKA V SUPERMARKETU: BOJKOTUJÍCÍ SPOTŘEBITELÉ JAKO AGENTI SOCIÁLNÍ ZMĚNY

At first glance, searching for why consumers abstain from certain products seems part of a research agenda that should primarily be elucidated by marketing literature. In fact, an individual's refusal to buy some goods used to be perceived as a matter of the marketplace, where the economic laws of supply and demand markedly predetermine a consumer's decision to purchase a product. However, in past decades, boycotts have been strongly interconnected with the concept of political participation, although the political nature of consumer behaviour often seems to be controversial. As some theorists of civic engagement have pointed out, in light of the incessant widening of the repertoire of participatory modes, studying political participation is not too far from “the theory of everything.” This article makes an effort to introduce boycotting as a relevant tool for influencing political affairs. It deals with the application of the approach developed by Sidney Verba and his colleagues that parsimoniously tells why some people are politically active while others are not. It asks whether their well-known Civic Voluntarism Model provides a suitable theoretical framework for explaining such a specific form of individual political action as boycotting in the 41 countries included in the fourth wave of the European Values Study (EVS). Due to the hierarchical data structure, multilevel models are employed to examine the effects of individual as well as contextual variables on the probability of a boycott.