Abstract

The article aims to investigate the transformations of political consumerism in Italy by comparing data from two nationally representative surveys conducted twenty years apart (2004 and 2023). This essay aims to verify if the militant dimension, predominantly linked to the forms of buycotting and especially boycotting, has been diluted over time, witnessing a reconfiguration of political consumerism in the direction of increased importance of lifestyle politics and new forms of individualized responsibility-taking within subpolitical arenas of participation. A particular classification of forms of political consumerism has provided a synthetic understanding of the political science approach, which focuses on classical forms of political consumerism, and the sociological literature, which studies critical and reflexive forms of consumption. The various modes of action move from more cooperative types, like philanthropic spending, to more confrontational ones, such as boycotting actions. These two ends of the continuum pass through specific forms like fair trade spending and buycotting. The paper highlights, while maintaining its basic features, a kind of normalization of political consumerism over time in Italy in various respects, such as identity, sociographic and participatory dimensions, consistent with the working hypotheses.