"Sanction-busting shoppers: consumer ‘buycotts’ as defensive economic statecraft" - by CWP alum Christaina Lai
Under what conditions will consumers support domestic industries targeted by economic sanctions? A growing literature examines how sanctions may generate nationalist boycotts in which consumers punish companies from sanctioning states, yet much less is known about the opposite behavior: ‘buycotts’, where consumers express goodwill toward sanctioned industries. Extending research on how market actors may condition sanction impacts, we conceptualize consumer buycotts as a mediating variable in the sanctioning process. Synthesizing insights from the IPE literature on boycotts and marketing science research on domestic buycotts, we specify empirical expectations about dynamics that may shape buycott participation and probe their plausibility through comparative case studies of responses to sanctions imposed by China on Australia, Taiwan, and Japan. We find buycotts may meaningfully mediate sanction impacts, especially when products are promoted by political leaders, publicly consumed, and have high demand elasticity. We also identify structural differences between buycotts and boycotts, including the visibility of nonparticipation, the costs of participation, and the dependence on supply-side infrastructure. We use our findings to begin inductively theorizing buycotts as a distinct form of political consumerism and a defensive instrument of economic statecraft, with implications for policy debates about countering economic coercion.
Christina Lai is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is interested in U.S.-China Relations, Chinese Foreign Policy, East Asian politics, and Qualitative Research Methods. Her works have appeared in the Politics, International Politics, Political Science, Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Review, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Asian Survey, and Asian Security.
Photo Credit: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2026.2667945#abstract
