The Role of Gender in Citizen's Political Consumerism

In the new age, the canon of people’s attention to politics have been moving from public domains to private ones, from collective belongingness to personal one, and from homogenizing ideologies to personal identities. In addition, new policies offer a new method of participation which opposes the existing communication channels via questioning legitimacy of the existing structures. Thus, one of the methods of new policies is political consumerism. Political consumers are individuals who select their required goods and services based on their societies’ political and moral considerations and not the nature of the goods themselves. The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between gender and political consumerism of citizens of Sabzevar. The data collection and analysis method is survey research. This study was conducted on 416 male and female citizens of Sabzevar City. To collect data, a questionnaire was employed. The validity of the questionnaire was evaluated formally and its reliability was assessed via the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Considering three aspects of political consumerism, behaviors, motivations, and habits, it was observed that there is significant differences in the degree of political consumerism of male and female respondents. In addition, women have more tendency to use political consumerism for influencing public decisions in the society.