How Political Ideology Shapes Consumption Decisions

Abstract

Political polarization in society has grown dramatically in recent years. Surveys indicate that the gap in the political opinions of conservatives and liberals has grown sharply over the past three decades (Pew Research Center, 2017), and the partisan divide in attitudes toward political issues has outpaced divisions observed along demographic lines (race, education, gender, age; Pew Research Center, 2019). These developments have put politics and political ideology at the center of individuals’ lives, making it indispensable for understanding consumption phenomena.

Most recently, the urgency of understanding how politics shape consumer decisions has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which ideology emerged as the strongest predictor of individuals’ decision to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S. (Albrecht, 2022; Kirzinger, Kearney, Hamel, & Brodie, 2021). To illustrate, surveys found that in the fall of 2021 60% of unvaccinated U.S. adults identified as or leaned Republican and only 17% identified as or leaned Democrat (Kirzinger et al., 2021). Against this backdrop, marketing scholars’ growing interest in exploring how ideology impacts consumption decisions is both timely and important.

To quantify the rising interest in studying political ideology, we analyzed articles on the topic published in premier academic journals in Marketing, Management, Psychology, Sociology, and General Science in 2010-2021. The analysis revealed (Figure 1) that Marketing began examining political ideology topics later than other disciplines. Figure 2 further details politics-related topics examined in articles published in Marketing and related disciplines (based on keyword searches within article titles). It confirms that research on political ideology is still nascent in Marketing compared to other fields, and that most of this research focuses on general politics (article titles feature the word “politics”) and consumer-level political ideology effects (“political ideology / identity / affiliation / orientation / conservatism”), while relatively less work focuses on political activism (“brand / corporate / sociopolitical activism / advocacy”), political participation (“ballot / citizen / election / voter” or “political attitudes”), political action (“lobbying”), or political polarization (“political polarization”).

Further analyses of the 10 most cited Marketing articles on political ideology in Web of Science revealed that the interdisciplinary reach of marketing research in this area is still limited (71.2% of the articles’ citations appeared in business and management journals). Psychology and environmental sciences are more likely to build on marketing findings on the topic (each comprised 10.8% of the articles’ citations) than other fields (2.8% of the articles’ citations appeared in ethics, 2.3% appeared in economics, 2.2% in engineering, 1.9% in communications, 1.1% in political science, and the remaining fields accounted for less than 1% of cites). Thus, many opportunities and challenges await marketing scholars in this important subject domain.

The present chapter reviews and synthesizes the key findings from recent marketing literature on political ideology to identify relevant areas of research. We begin with an overview of how political ideology is conceptualized and operationalized in the literature. We then outline three levels at which political ideology impacts consumer behavior. Specifically, we overview recent findings on how consumption decisions are shaped by the individual-level political ideology of consumers, the political ideology of companies with which consumer interact, and the political ideology of the broader system which consumer inhabit and navigate. We conclude with a discussion of interesting and important areas for future research.