A Longitudinal Analysis of the Link Between Lifestyle Politics and Other Forms of Political Participation.

The role of lifestyle politics as a new form of political participation is heavily debated. Lifestyle politics has been defined as using everyday life choices for political reasons. Some argue that lifestyle politics offer consumers easily accessible opportunities to engage in politics in their everyday life. Moreover, lifestyle politics may offer a low-threshold action form leading to a wider engagement. Critics have opposed this position for various reasons. They criticize the individualized approach to change represented by lifestyle politics, arguing that only collective action can generate real change. Furthermore, they argue that lifestyle politics are not only useless; they are harmful distractions from ‘more serious’ forms of participation. Underlying these debates are two common but untested assumptions. Firstly, it assumes that lifestyle politics are intrinsically individual behaviours. Secondly, it assumes that lifestyle politics make individuals either more or less likely to engage in other forms of political participation. Both assumptions have been addressed with anecdotal evidence. Studies into lifestyle movement organizations show indeed that lifestyle politics can take collective forms and that within such collectives, some individuals engage with ‘more serious’ forms of action, such as protesting or lobbying, as well. However, in the absence of detailed, longitudinal, quantitative data, scholars have so far not been able to test these assumptions in a more rigorous way. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by analysing panel data from a sample of 2292 politically interested Belgian citizens. We collected a first wave of data in March 2017 and will collect a second one in June 2018. By focusing on politically interested individuals, we ensure that there are sufficient lifestyle activists in our sample whose political behaviour can be tracked. Specifically, we measure their lifestyle politics with seven items, including boycotts, buycotts, recycling and prosumption. To analyse how individual or collective lifestyle politics are we asked whether those actions took place in a formal collective or whether individuals informally encouraged others to engage in lifestyle politics. Next, we test whether lifestyle politics lead to more or less engagement in other forms of political participation with a longitudinal analysis of individuals’ reported behaviour in 2017 and 2018. We take into account various mediator variables to test whether positive relations may exist for some, whilst negative relations may exist for others. For instance, we assume that the more effective respondents find lifestyle politics, the more likely they are to become focused more exclusively on this action form. In sum, we shed new light on the potential role of lifestyle politics for citizens’ more general political participation.