Support for Ethical Consumerism and Welfare States in the Global Economy: Complements or Substitutes?
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Author | Luc Fransen,Brian Burgoon |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12407 |
Support for Ethical Consumerism and Welfare
States in the Global Economy: Complements
or Substitutes?
Brian Burgoon and Luc Fransen
University of Amsterdam
Abstract
This paper explores attitudes about alternative paths to promoting labor and social standards in the global political economy:
public welfare states protecting workers and social standards through policy and regulation, versus private ‘red consumerism’
protecting standards through consumer buying-power and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Scholarly debate has emerged
over whether these public and private realms reinforce or undermine one another, but has lacked empirical traction to sys-
tematically judge such relationships. This paper provides such traction by analyzing European public opinion towards welfare
redistribution and towards using consumer power to protect labor and social standards. It matches public opinion data on
attitudes towards such issues to measures of existing public and private social protection. The analysis of public opinion sug-
gests that red consumerism is more popular in settings with already-generous public protection, including strong social-policy
programs and labor regulation. But the tendency of trade competition and other economic risks to spur a citizen’s support for
welfare-state redistribution is diminished where CSR activity and ethical consumerism have stronger footholds. While ‘red’
ethical consumerism and CSR activities may be facilitated by generous existing social policies, they might well erode citizen
support for those policies.
Protecting social and labor standards has long been the
province of public, hard-law regulations in redistributive
welfare states, including the tax code, social services and
transfers, and employment regulations. Increasingly, how-
ever, protecting social and labor standards has involved
soft-law private regulation, including corporate social
responsibility (CSR) policies and ethical consumer move-
ments supporting them. The welfare state regulations and
private regulations have largely been analyzed as separate
realms of social protection, with distinct politics underlying
each, and with distinct possibilities for pursuing equity and
efficiency.
Yet, the two realms of regulation likely affect one another.
The increasing use and popularity of private regulation and
consumer movements coincide with a period of strong
political and economic pressure towards retrenchment of
welfare states and labor regulations. Such patterns raise not
only the question of whether private or public regulations
are most effective in protecting labor and social standards,
but also of whether public and private regulations under-
mine or undergird one another.
Scholarly attention to this latter question may be modest,
but it does yield clearly competing answers. The minimal
dialogue between the literatures on welfare states and on
private regulation suggest a first, default view, that the pub-
lic and private realms of social provision are separate
enough, with distinct enough politics, that they have no
substantial effects for one another. Other literature,
however, suggests strong interaction between public and
private protection, with contributions yielding opposite con-
clusions. One view is that the public and private realms of
social provision are substitutes, where development of the
one can undermine development of the other. Here, the
declining political fortunes and/or effectiveness of hard-law
public provisions are no coincidence but instead have
provoked development of private regulation. Whichever
interventions are the most effective, the governmental and
non-governmental realms are thought to be imperfect sub-
stitutes that compete for scarce political resources or pro-
vide incentives to narrowly focus on the one intervention
that hollow-out the other (Cutler et al., 1999; Reich 2008;
Kinderman 2012). A final view, however, suggests that pub-
lic and private protection are complements that can mutu-
ally reinforce one another, as private initiatives sensitize
actors to accept and create spill-overs to support public reg-
ulation, or vice versa (Campbell, 2007; Gjølberg, 2009b,
2011; Midttun et al., 2006). These three, competing views
constitute genuine controversy over the relationship
between public and private paths to social protection.
An important problem is that this controversy has taken
place on very modest empirical foundations, not least
because it is hard to find data and even harder to find ana-
lytical methods to gauge how different kinds of interven-
tions influence one another politically (Brejning, 2012). An
important question for political-economic governance is
therefore left unanswered: Are private regulations and
©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12407
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 3 . May 2017
42
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