There are two different ways one might use economics to analyze political activism. (Well, more than two, but in this post I’ll just be talking about two of them.) First, what do I mean when I speak of political activism? I mean things like attending rallies or protests, signing petitions, voting in elections, frequently advocating for and attempting to persuade people of some particular view or in favor of some kind of political policy, things of that nature. 

One way to think of activism is to view it as a form of production. In this model, the activist is engaging in activism in order to produce some kind of output. Thus, activists with a grievance over the justice system are protesting in the streets, signing petitions, voting, and raising arguments in an attempt to produce a better justice system. Environmental activists engage in these activities in order to produce the outcome of better environmental health, however one may define that, and so on. When seen as a form of production, we can say that activism seeks to ensure or improve the production of public goods. In the environmental case, for example, improved air quality would be a public good – it is nonrival and nonexcludable. 

The second way to view activism is not as a form of production, but as a form of consumption. What does it mean to be a consumer of activism? It means the activist engages in activism in order to enjoy some private benefits. These benefits include things like feeling a sense of community and belonging with fellow activists, acquiring social status, and a sense of purpose and meaning. While activism as production is oriented around the production of public goods, activism as consumption is about attaining private goods. When engaged in as a form of consumption, the wider results of activism are externalities.

Just as education can be both a form of human capital accumulation and a form of social signaling, activism can be both a form of production and a form of consumption. Any given activist can be motivated by either, or by both to varying degrees. But each form of activism has very different implications for what we should expect.

When activism is viewed as a form of production, we would expect the activist to be deeply informed about the subject – environmental science, criminal justice, or whatever else it may be. They would have well-defined end goals – a clear point where one could say “mission accomplished” and upon completing that mission, the activism would cease. The activist would have a careful eye on how their activities are moving things closer to or away from their desired goal. This would motivate the activist to engage in self-scrutiny and course correction if an approach seems to be ineffective or counterproductive.

When activism is engaged in as a form of consumption, none of those above conditions need apply. Since the activist is seeking personal psychological and emotional satisfaction, as well as social esteem, there is no particular need to be deeply informed about the topic. We would expect to see people who both passionately protest about some issue while simultaneously being unable to answer even the most basic questions on that same issue. Nor will the activist be able to clearly identify and define what the desired outcome is, and how they will know it’s been achieved, in anything but the vaguest and most indefinable ways. Rather than saying “mission accomplished” at any point, the activist would constantly move the goalpost. How effectively activism achieves its stated goals will also not come under scrutiny by the activist, nor will new approaches be taken if a particular mode of activism seems to be ineffective or actively counterproductive. Instead of focusing on the issues that are most pressing and using methods that are the most effective, the activist will be motivated by whatever issues are most trendy, or make them feel the best. Their activism will be centered on activities that send the strongest signal and raise their social status, rather than on what effectively achieves the stated end.

Activism as production has a number of features that make it potentially socially beneficial in a way activism as consumption lacks. The course-correction methods we would expect to find in activism as production will of course be imperfect, but they will at least help the movement tend in a direction that leads to the production or improvement of some public good. But activism as consumption lacks these mechanisms, so it’s only by sheer chance that the externalities of this consumption will be positive rather than negative. And there is a higher prior probability for the externalities to be negative – there are more ways to make things worse than to make things better, so activities taken that lack methods of evaluation and correction are far more likely to do harm than good. 

It seems to me that the vast majority of political activism today is the consumption of a private good with high negative externalities, with relatively little being a productive activity that genuinely contributes to the creation or improvement of some public good. Those who treat activism and political engagement as a consumption good are best described from a line of T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party:

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.