How Mainstream Consumers Think about Consumer Rights and Responsibilities

The study found four elements of political ideology influenced, in different forms and in varying degrees, consumer beliefs about consumer rights and responsibilities iThe paper demonstrated that consumers’ opinions about right and responsibilities are infused by the prevailing political ideology, through 14 in-depth interviews of credit card users in Australia. n the credit card category: individual autonomy, social equality, consumer sovereignty, and corporate dominance. Consumers negotiate tensions between each of these four myths, thus each informant’s political ideology is a product of overlapping and blends of the four myths. Some people holding strong libertarian positions disdain government regulations and indebted consumers, while people holding liberal positions sought some type of accommodation between autonomy and use of government regulation to protect more vulnerable consumers. Some informants exhibited high consumer sovereignty through heavy credit card usage that yielded a variety of functional benefits including accrual of loyalty points and interest free use of banks’ money, while some others see corporations are basically fair and well meaning, or see the situation as more a product of natural order. Ideology triggers moral judgments about self and others that inform the deservedness perceptions of various participants. Credit cards enable instant spending when people do not have the money. They have a tension between the freedom to achieve consumption objectives that cards facilitate and the potential for constraining debt that may result from (over) exercising that freedom. The degree of self-control is said to sit at the heart of this tensional management, which influences the relative weighting between entitlement and frugality. In the case of credit cards, there is more disdain than sympathy for people in card debt. An ideological perspective reveals that there is a broad range of often competing beliefs that mute sympathy, self-efficacy, and the passion for action.