Professional Sport as a Form of Political Representation for Marginalized Groups

• In Event: Experiments on Political Behavior in Advanced Democracies

Abstract

Sport is an important social institution, with its own set of norms and values that govern how power is accessed and wielded (Lecours, 2005). Furthermore, sport operates on many levels within countries and across the world, gaining new meanings as it is experienced in varied historical, political, and social contexts (Bloom and Willard, 2002). The social and political contexts of sport as a social institution have also been undergoing an evolution. Professional sport teams in North America have historically engaged with certain political causes, namely the military, emergency services and law enforcement, and not others, such as marginalized members of local communities (Thorson and Serazio, 2018; Serazio and Thorson, 2020). More specifically, sport environments have historically been masculine and heteronormative in ways that are hostile towards marginalized groups such as women and the LGBTQ+ community (Ian Borer, 2009; Flores et al., 2020; Allison and Knoester, 2021).
However, more recently sports leagues and teams in North America have begun to engage with causes such as LGBTQ+ rights in the UK (Stonewall, 2023), Canada (Toronto Blue Jays, 2018) and the United States (du Plessis, 2022). This marks an era of more progressive causes being platformed by sports teams, also including Indigenous rights (MLB, 2021) and anti-racism messaging (Thomas and Wright, 2022).
My research mobilizes experimental methods. I conducted a survey experiment designed to study the potential impact of sports teams holding LGBTQ+ Pride initiatives on relevant community groups. The experiment uses random assignment to treat participants with either a message about a local sports team hosting a Pride themed game (Stonewall’s rainbow laces campaign in the UK, and pride nights in North America) or a military themed event (remembrance day and the poppy in the UK and military appreciation nights in North America) to assess how the mobilization of sports teams representing marginalized groups at their events affects levels of acceptance and support for issues faced by LGBTQ+ groups. All participants answer an open-ended question asking them to identify a local sport team, this answer is piped in for their treatment. I then ask participants to assess their affinity for the local sports team as my main independent variable. My dependent variable consists of attitudes towards the relevant social groups platformed during sports related social events. I hypothesize that treatment with the pride event will relate to more positive evaluations of members of the LGBTQ+ community. I will assess average treatment effects between participants who receive the pride and military social events. I use data consisting of a sample from the US and the UK to assess my hypothesis.
The literature on the study of politics with respect to sport has mainly focused on national teams as tools for nation building (Bairner, 1996; Houlihan, 1997; Arnold, 2021), professional teams representing regional divides (Tuñón and Brey, 2016; Whigham and May, 2017) and individuals engaging in acts of protest (Willis et al., 2021; Thomas and Wright, 2022), but less so on the impact specific teams and leagues have on the social causes they engage with in their representative role as local symbols. The work that does exist at the team level is centred on the effect of individual players. That work focuses on rare instances of parasocial contact, when entertainment celebrities provide exposure to different ways of life, mobilizing teams as local in-group symbols to affect opinion change regarding prejudiced attitudes (Alarababa’H et al., 2021).
However, the dominant focus of the sport-politics literature overlooks the wider representative potential of sports teams and their engagement with increasingly diverse and inclusive social causes, including groups that were previously excluded (Melton and MacCharles, 2021; Melton et al., 2022). In the literature on the value of sports team fandom, it has been shown that fandom creates strong psychological connections linked to feelings of inclusion that, in turn, boost self-esteem and social identity (Jacobson, 1979; Hirt and Clarkson, 2011; Phua, 2010; Serazio, 2013; Wann et al, 2017). Thus, the intersection of sports teams and social causes constitutes descriptive representation, but also the status of previously hostile sports environments becoming more welcoming to various groups makes this representation potentially substantive (Hayes and Hibbing, 2017). This representation can affect positive psychological connections and serve as a mediating force in the formation of social identity through inclusive representation (Jacobson, 1979; Wann et al, 2017). That is the gap I hope to address with a focus on sport teams as local symbols of inclusivity or exclusion.

Author

• Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, University of Western Ontario