Gateway or getaway? Testing the link between lifestyle politics and other modes of political participation

Journal Paper by Joost de Moor and Soetkin Verhaegen
European Political Science Review
January 2020

Abstract

Many have depicted a steady rise in lifestyle politics. Individuals are increasingly using everyday life choices about consumption, transportation, or modes of living to address political, environmental, or ethical issues. While celebrated by some as an expansion of political participation, others worry this trend may be detrimental for democracy, for instance, by reducing citizens to consumers. Implicit in this common critique is the notion that lifestyle politics will replace, rather than coexist with or lead to, other forms of political participation.

We provide the first detailed longitudinal analysis to test these hypotheses. Using unique panel data from 1538 politically active individuals from the Flemish region of Belgium (2017–18), we demonstrate that over time, lifestyle politics functions as a gateway into institutionalised and non-institutionalised modes of political participation and that this relationship is mediated by individuals’ increased political concerns.

Introduction

Does lifestyle politics alienate people from other forms of political participation or rather lead people to do more activities? This paper aims to add empirical rigour to this longstanding debate about the consequences of a rise in lifestyle politics (Bennett, 1998; Micheletti and Stolle, 2010; Stolle and Micheletti, 2013). Specifically, it offers the first longitudinal analysis to test the ‘crowding out’ hypothesis which suggests that when people start engaging in politics through their lifestyle and consumption, they will abandon other, arguably more important types of political participation (Rössel and Schenk, 2017; van Deth, 2018). We test whether engagement in lifestyle politics indeed leads away from other modes of political participation, or rather to them, as others have suggested (e.g. Willis and Schor, 2012). We refer to these opposing ideas as the ‘gateway’ (to) and ‘getaway’ (from) hypotheses.

Both sides of the debate have presented opposing arguments. Authors advancing the getaway hypothesis (e.g. Berglund and Matti, 2006; Szasz, 2007; Wejryd, 2018) argue that lifestyle politics (1) reduces the resources available for other forms of participation; (2) makes lifestyle activists feel they have ‘done enough’; and (3) takes place in lifestyle movement organizations (LMOs) that insulate participants from other modes of participation. In direct contrast, proponents of the gateway hypothesis (e.g. Gotlieb and Wells, 2012; Willis and Schor, 2012; Baumann et al., 2015) argue that (1) people do not have a predefined amount of participatory resources available; (2) lifestyle politics can boost motivations to engage in politics more generally; and (3) LMOs offer opportunities to lifestyle activists to become more generally engaged. Evidence from case studies and experiments supports claims on both sides of the debate but tells little about patterns of behaviour in a more general population. Survey research has remained cross-sectional and is therefore limited in explaining changes over time.

The current paper provides the first quantitative, large-N, longitudinal test of the gateway/ getaway hypotheses, and their underlying causal assumptions, using original data from a panel study of 1538 politically active individuals from the Flemish region of Belgium (2017–18, using the ‘UA Citizens Panel’). With detailed repeated observations on various forms of political participation, we are able to test the relationship between lifestyle politics and institutionalized and non-institutionalized political participation over time. Our findings mainly indicate positive associations with both these modes of participation, thereby lending support to the gateway hypothesis. This relationship appears to come about mainly as lifestyle politics increases participants’ political concerns.

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