The Role of Individual- and Contextual-Level Social Capital in Product Boycotting: A Multilevel Analysis

Product boycotts represent an important form of sustainable consumption, as withholding purchasing can restrain firms from damaging the natural environment or breaking social rules. However, our understanding of consumer participation in these protests is limited. Most previous studies have focused on the psychological and economic determinants of product boycotting. Drawing on social capital literature, this study builds a framework that explains how individual- and contextual-level social capital affects consumer participation in boycotts of products. A multilevel logistic regression analysis of 29 country representative samples derived from the European Social Survey (N = 54221) shows that at the individual level product boycotting is associated with a person's social ties, whereas at the country level, generalized trust and social networks positively affect consumer decisions to take part in these protests. These results suggest that to better understand differences among countries in consumer activism, it is necessary to consider the role of social capital as an important predictor of product boycotting.