#  Pigskin and Politics 

 





September 11, 2008

 

 

Here's a paper in which the authors devised a clever way to gather data and answer an interesting question:

> Pigskins and Politics: Linking Expressive Behavior and VotingDavid Laband, Ram Pandit, Anne Laband & John Sophocleus  
> Journal of Sports Economics, October 2008, Pages 553-560
> 
> Abstract:  
> 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.

What I think is clever here is that the way the project uses observable factors (stuff in your yard, whether you vote, how much your house costs) to shed light on a fairly interesting aspect of behavior (why do people vote?). Based on a [working paper](http://pubchoicesoc.org/papers_2008/laband_pandit_et_al.pdf) version, the authors simply drove around the city of Auburn, recording whether houses displayed political signs and Auburn paraphernalia (ranging from flying an AU flag to "placing an inflated figure of Aubie (AU's school mascot) in one's yard"). They later linked this up with voter rolls and data on home prices to get their correlations.

Of course, there are some problems with using football paraphernalia as a measure of "nonpolitical expressiveness." I don't know Auburn, but are Auburn fans more likely to be Republicans (controlling for value of house)? I am guessing they are. If more enthusiastic Auburn fans are also more enthusiastic Republicans (not just more expressive Republicans, but more ideologically committed ones), then these estimates would indicate too large a role for "expressiveness," particularly since the authors don't record even the party affiliation of people living in the houses, let alone strength of party identification. But their measure may be less confounded with political commitment itself than measures of expressiveness you could find in other communities. If you were to do this in Cambridge, I suppose you could use upkeep of the garden as a measure of expressiveness and community orientation (you wouldn't get far using Harvard football signs), but attention to the garden is of course correlated with wealth, which means there would be all the more difficulty in extracting the pure economic/political factors.

Anyway, I applaud the authors for devising a measure of expressiveness that works pretty well and is so easily observable.

Posted by [Andy Eggers](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/andy-eggers/) at September 11, 2008 8:50 AM



 

 

 



 

 

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