“DROPPING THE BALL”: The Understudied Nexus of Sports and Politics

Abstract

From the Roman Colosseum to Wimbledon Stadium, the Olympics to the Super Bowl, sports have always played a central role in societies. With so much at stake-money, pride, power (and occasionally even fun)-sports are undeniably political. Yet despite this recognition, political scientists and policy scholars devote little attention to the study of sports, especially compared to other disciplines like business, law, and economics. We offer reasons for this void and suggest how political scientists can begin to fill it. In our view, the nexus between sports and politics is not only a vital topic of study on its own, but it can also provide a lens through which to examine-and test-broader questions in the discipline. We propose how scholars can think more systematically about the interaction of politics and sports and leverage the distinctive qualities of sports to improve causal identification across a range of issue areas and subfields in political science and policy studies.

The Effect of Economic Vulnerability on Protest Participation in the National Football League

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Houston College Sport Programs’ Hurricane Harvey Communication

“…Consumers often utilize sport to remove themselves from the difficulties they face each day (McDonald, Milne, & Hong, 2002;Kim & James, 2019). Because sport helps to shape both society and the people that make up that society and the reach of sport includes political alliances and social order (Gift & Miner, 2017), a study of sport and its role with severe weather and natural disaster phenomenon may be a departure from sport's role as distraction. However, researchers have found big business involvement plays a key role in a nation's health in times of disaster (Ballesteros, Useem, & Wry, 2017).…”

The World Cup and Presidential Popularity in Brazil

“…hy do rulers risk their political capital by investing in and supporting the staging of sporting mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games, whose results, in terms of popularity, can be controversial? Even though the relationship between sports and politics is old, (BONDE, 2009;GUTTMANN, 2003;SIGOLI and DE ROSE JUNIOR, 2004;VINOKUR, 1988), this question is new for both political science in general (GIFT and MINER, 2017) and studies of public opinion and presidential popularity, more specifically.…”