After the recent execution of Troy Davis, awarding-winning documentary filmmaker and author Michael Moore called for a nationwide boycott of the state of Georgia. He threatened a similar boycott of Connecticut when U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman opposed the Obama administration’s health care reform bill in 2009.
Although the boycott of Connecticut never materialized, boycotts can have significant political or economic impacts. For example, Americans responded to France’s opposition to the Iraq war by substantially reducing consumption of French wines. Phillip Leslie of UCLA and I estimated that the boycott resulted in more than $100 million of lost revenue. Sales fell as much as 26 percent.
In 1990, when Arizona voters rejected honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, the ensuing boycott had a significant economic impact. Tourism declined and the NFL reversed its decision to award Arizona the 1993 Super Bowl. More recently, two Arizona cities prepared to sue the state because of tough anti-immigration legislation that they maintained would burden them with enforcement costs and decreased tourism.
For several years, South Carolina has been the target of a boycott over the display of the Confederate flag at the state capitol building. Despite efforts by Myrtle Beach, S.C., to distance itself from the controversy surrounding this issue, the Atlantic Coast Conference decided to move the 2011-13 Atlantic Coast Conference baseball tournaments out of the state.
Will Moore’s proposed boycott of Georgia have a similar impact? Should the state, and especially the city of Atlanta — recently ranked by Forbes as the nation’s seventh most-visited city — anticipate declines in tourist traffic?
Probably not.
Boycotts work well if there is a respected champion such as the NAACP, which has demonstrated a high level of vigilance in South Carolina. That boycott also has been locally driven by the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP, which has been instrumental in sustaining the effort. While the boycott of French products had a sharp initial impact, it was largely over within six months. Similarly, the national media will move on from the Davis case to other topics.
Even if socially conscious tourists trim their visits to Atlanta, it is unclear that this would be the best way to convey staunch opposition to the decision to execute Davis. Georgia ranks second in the nation in the number of black-owned businesses, and they would certainly be adversely impacted. A better path might be to follow Moore’s other course of action.
He is donating all the proceeds of the Georgia sales of his most recent book to the Innocence Project (a nonprofit that has helped exonerate 273 prisoners using DNA testing since 1992) and is pledging to fund African-American voter registration in Georgia. While external boycotts can be effective, it may be better in this case to have a locally based electorate advocating for change.
Larry Chavis is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan- Flagler Business School.
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