Political consumerism and the decline of class politics in Western Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines whether social class influences the likelihood of engaging in political consumerism in Western Europe. Political consumption is the intentional buying or abstention from buying (boycotting) specific products for political, ethical, or ecological reasons. The interest in analyzing political consumerism lies in substantive and theoretical reasons. First, it is a widespread but not very adequately studied form of noninstitutionalized political participation. Second, various theories claim that class is an inadequate category for explaining political behavior. According to the postmodern theory of social stratification, patterns of consumption are among the key factors that define the new status communities, thus breaking with the traditional logic of social classes. Along the same lines, individualization theory suggests that in contemporary societies, individuals are free to continuously redefine their identity and choose the lifestyle they prefer. We argue that the study of political consumption offers a particularly appropriate case for testing the empirical plausibility of the hypothesis of the ‘decline of class politics’. Multilevel analysis using European Social Survey data reveals, contrary to the above-mentioned postulates, that social class strongly affects the likelihood of being one’s a political consumer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".