People with political yard signage are more likely to vote than those who have only, say, a garden gnome, and now research shows that this goes for football team crap-o-la spread over the front yard.
Expressiveness reflects group identification/affiliation and signals trustworthiness and also reflects the individual’s desire to ‘cheer’ or ‘boo’ favored or unfavored candidates. From empirical data –collected by driving around and seeing what Auburn football team crap-o-la people have in their yards– researchers found those expressing team spirit were twice as likely to vote as those without that junk.
The paper is: Laband, DN, Pandit, R., Laband, AM, Sophocleus, JP, ” Pigskins and Politics, Linking Expressive Behavior and Voting,” Journal of Sports Economics, Vol. 9, No. 5, 553-560 (October 1 2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1527002507314038
(See the working paper here, also discussed in the Social Science Statistics blog here, with additional comments adding some color; abstract reproduced below).
Laband et al. studied whether voting is more likely by people who support their team or candidate with yard signage, than those who have no front yard affiliative-indecia. Like, those that only have a rusted car on cement blocks or Christmas lights they never take down.
The methods were great: the authors drove around Auburn (in neighborhoods pre-screened for zoning allowing junk in your yard), and noted which houses had (i) Auburn football crap-o-la; (ii) political signage;and (iii) which houses had an American flag out on patriotic holidays. Auburn football junk included:
(1) flying an AU flag, (2) affixing an AU pom-pom on one’s mailbox, (3) affixing an AU sticker on one’s mailbox, (4) placing an AU sign in one’s yard, (5) placing an AU windmill in one’s yard, (6) placing an inflated figure of Aubie (AU’s school mascot) in one’s yard.
Political signage could be Republican or Democrat – or both – and data was collected close to an upcoming 2006 election. The authors correlated voting behavior with public records:
. . . In terms of consolidated findings, we calculate that those households that displayed any of the three expressive behaviors analyzed were 2.4 times as likely to have at least one member who voted than households that did not display any of the three expressive behaviors.. . .
So. What about the election? The states up for grabs in this election are: Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.
If pro-sports endorsements correlate to voter turnout and voter choice, it’s a tough call (assuming pro-athlete endorsements hold some sway with the fans). ESPN Database of donations from pro-sports figures to presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama, click here, show it’s about even. Fox News seems to be on to this — last Superbowl, they had run-down of candidates from a variety of locations (here’s an article from the NY Observer).
As an aside, I tend to agree with the conclusions here based on anecdote : the Southern branch of the Swivelchair family tree has an Auburn walk-on (in the day) who was about as low key as you could get, and I never noticed any team affiliation junk anywhere. I would doubt that this individual would vote based on team spirit, but rather on the facts at hand.
As far as choice of candidate, I won’t even try to guess.
One more point: drinking alcohol may also be an expression of group identification among football fans — and perhaps an alternative group identification activity (like, putting up yard crap-o-la) could be used instead of getting drunk at football games.
Laband et al. abstract below the jump:
Laband, DN, Pandit, R., Laband, AM, Sophocleus, JP, ” Pigskins and Politics, Linking Expressive Behavior and Voting,” Journal of Sports Economics, Vol. 9, No. 5, 553-560 (October 1 2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1527002507314038
In this article, the authors use data collected from nearly 4,000 single-family residences in Auburn, Alabama to investigate empirically whether nonpolitical expressiveness (displaying support for Auburn University’s football team outside one’s home) is related to the probability that at least one resident voted in the national/state/local elections held on November 7, 2006. Controlling for the assessed value of the property and the length of ownership, the authors find that the likelihood of voting by at least one person from a residence with an external display of support for Auburn University is nearly 2 times greater than from a residence without such a display. This suggests that focusing narrowly on voting as a reflection of political expressiveness may lead researchers to overstate the relative importance of expressiveness in the voting context and understate its more fundamental and encompassing importance in a variety of contexts, only one of which may be voting.
Key Words: voting • expressive behavior • college football • team support
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