The Role of Social Capital in Boycotting Products during Crisis and Recovery: A Cross-Country Analysis

The study tries to get a deeper understanding of how two macro-level antecedents, the state of the economy and the social capital of a country boycotting of products. When selecting these factors, we assume that consumer activism is vulnerable to the economic conditions (such as a crisis or recovery) in which consumers live. Secondly, given that consumer boycotts involve a collective action problem (Klein et al., 2004), we want to know how social capital interacts with different economic conditions when shaping the environment for boycotting. More specifically, we set up a twofold objective: 1) to show how the outbreak of an economic crisis and then an economic recovery affect consumer boycotts; and 2) to examine whether and/or how social capital moderates the effects of economic conditions.