How Political is Veganism? Exploring the Motives, Aims and Attitudes of People Living a Vegan Lifestyle

In the last few decades, citizens have increasingly started using ordinary daily activities to express ethi-cal, political, or environmental concerns. By using their way of life to take responsibility for a greater good, citizens presumably engage in lifestyle politics, a creative form of political participation (de Moor 2016, Stolle and Micheletti 2013). One example of how the daily life has become politicized is the growing commitment to a vegan lifestyle. Veganism, along with consumer boycotts, internet activism or urban gardening, are a few examples of the more individualized and unconventional ways citizens en-gage politically in the private and public sphere. This rise in untraditional forms of engagement has led some scholars to qualify the warnings of a decline in political participation, as political activism is apparently reinventing itself (Barnes, Kaase, and al. 1979, Macedo et al. 2005, Norris 2002). Scholars have consequently suggested broadening the ana-lytical scope of political participation, which, on the other hand, raises the valid question of how politi-cal the ever-increasing repertoire of creative activities is (Norris 2002, Theocharis and van Deth 2018, van Deth 2001). Basically, what separates an apolitical activity from political participation is the driving motivation: In order to consider a certain act as political engagement, it must be motivated by political concerns or aims (Stolle and Micheletti 2013, van Deth 2014). As an example, boycotting animal-based products is only a political activity when it is conducted by the goal to avoid animal suffering, reduce climate change or other political goals. Even though scholars acknowledge the political character of veganism (Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones 2012, Stolle and Micheletti 2013, Wrenn 2011) there is no study that has systematically nor sub-stantially investigated what exactly motivates people to adopt a vegan lifestyle. Research to date has therefore not yet determined how political veganism is. This paper aims to address this research gap by empirically exploring the vegan lifestyle as a potential form of unconventional political participation. For that purpose, a specially designed survey on the vegan lifestyle was conducted in Switzerland in 2018, where a total of 648 vegans offered novel insights, among other things, about their motivations, inten-tions, political orientation and attitudes, or about their engagement in political activities. The findings show that avoiding animal suffering is considered by 93% of the vegan participants as a very important reason to live vegan, followed by considerations for environmental protection (78%) and the reduction of world hunger (47%). The concern for individual health, considered a non-political motive, is in comparison rather low with 42%. Deciding for the single most important reason for living vegan, 71% indicated it to be the avoidance of animal suffering, whereas 12% of vegans consider envi-ronmental protection, and 11% individual health as the main reason. These results suggest that vegans are predominantly motivated by political motives, which provides empirical support for the argument that veganism constitutes a creative form of political participation. Further, the findings offer an im-portant contribution to the study of lifestyle politics in particular and political participation behavior in general.