Private Choice and Public Influence: Political Consumers Behind the Mirror of the Market

The notion of political consumption has two implications: First, consumers wield some kind of power that they can use to effect social change through the marketplace. Second, political consumption refers to and somehow combines the rationalities of two subsystems, politics and the economy. Yet regarding their everyday, highly individualized shopping decisions, consumers do not appear to command a great deal of power. What kind of influence, then, can individual economic decisions have on corporate policies? Is that influence robust enough to attribute power to consumers? And if consumers do indeed have power, how can we conceive the implied translation of political concerns into the monetary logic of the economy? An answer to those questions needs to take into account the societal context of political consumption. This paper analyses how political consumerism relates to the functional differentiation of modern society and how a sociological concept of the market can help us understand its efficacy.