Political consumerism is increasingly acknowledged as a form of citizen participation and also as a set of
behaviors instrumental to the accomplishment of sustainable consumption goals. However, scholarly
research has overlooked occurrences in developing societies and tended to overemphasize cultural explanations,
anchored in post-materialist values and the effects of sub-politics, as a catalyst for political
consumerism. We offer an alternative interpretation, arguing that corporations invoke consumers' sense
of shared responsibility for realizing public goods in order to mobilize consumers to engage in boycotting
and buycotting behaviors. Using a representative sample of adults living in urban areas of Brazil, bivariate
and multivariate analyses are performed to test the relative weight of these different explanations. The
breadth of favorable attitudes towards corporate social responsibility and their stronger correlation with
political-consumption behaviors suggest that citizens from low-income democracies strongly rely on
cues related to corporate-citizenship activism for achieving political goals at the marketplace.