Cash-voting via buycotting can mobilize consumers where the state fails.

Evidence

Proponents of buycotting see these premiums as pure political expression … Some even argue that cash-voting goes further than ballot-casting: we buy, and therefore incentivize producers, every day; but we vote far less often. “We are convinced that how people buy can be more effective than how they vote,” said Francesco Galante, director of Comitato Addiopizzo, a civic group in Palermo, Sicily, that has taken on the mafia using an analogue of fair-trade labeling. In 2004, some volunteers in Palermo decided to bypass politicians: they approached local businesses, many of which paid the mafia ‘pizzo,’ or bribes, and asked them to certify that they paid pizzo no longer; in exchange, the Comitato brought them business from pizzo-averse Sicilians. Today 400 businesses and 9,000 customers have joined, even though products from the law-abiding companies often cost more. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 413

Categorization

• SHARE: The Addiopizzo anti-mafia buycott is a striking concrete case the reader’s colleagues on Italian governance or civil society might enjoy.
• XREF: Connects to law-mediated reputation regimes in the diamond trade and other extrajudicial governance the reader has studied. — connects to: Violations of consumer expectations can spark democratic revolution — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1595
• QUESTION: Is Addiopizzo’s success evidence that buycotting works where the state is weak, undermining Mirowski’s dismissal of it as mere expression?

Broader Connections

• Violations of consumer expectations can spark democratic revolution #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1595