Home-field advantage<\/strong><\/p>\nFor their study, Harmon and Hwang looked at the impact of the protests on ticket sales and used local economic and political conditions to estimate the impact of player protests on game attendance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe attendance statistics are produced by the NFL at a website they have,\u201d Harmon explains. \u201cAnd then, to understand political polarization, we looked a two different data sources on Black Lives Matter protests as well as data from the Washington Post that tracks fatal police shootings of unarmed Black males.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a measure of political polarization, they used county-level voting data from the 2016 U.S. presidential contest between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
They also used sports betting data to see how competitive games were and controlled for things like the day of the week, the time of day, and game-day weather.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause that could affect attendance,\u201d Harmon says. \u201cThe idea is that you\u2019ve got your main variables of interest, but then you need to control for other factors that might influence attendance. So, you isolate those.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were particularly interested in how these protests by NFL players in those two years affect attendance of the games in the stadium, because there are some hot debates about the effect, negative and positive,\u201d says Hwang. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not simple. We had to systematically organize the data into panel format and employ causal interference methods for panel data that can control for confounding factors, such as team, game location, week, and seasonal effects.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Harmon and Hwang found was that some reduction in game-day attendance was consistent with boycott behavior amongst fans.<\/p>\n
That reduction, however, was somewhat offset by attendance from MAGA-aligned fans engaged in counter-protest as well as fans who attended in order to support player protests.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are very cautious to be decisive in one specific direction,\u201d says Hwang. \u201cClaims that political protests are driving fans to or pushing fans away from a stadium are really not that simple. The results are mixed, and fans still have a lot of incentive to be in stadium, either supporting or disagreeing with these protests.\u201d<\/p>\n
The greatest in-stadium attendance impact, the researchers noted, was the response of fans to away-team player protests, where fans had a more statistically significant response in attendance to protests by away teams visiting their stadium as opposed to protests by players on their home team.<\/p>\n
The finding showed that attendance was lower when an away team\u2019s players were protesting, as opposed to a home team, an unexpected result for Harmon, who suggested home-team loyalty or local demographics might be the cause.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big surprise was the away-team reaction \u2013 I thought it would be uniform,\u201d Harmon says. \u201cI did not expect that it would be largely in response to away teams.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new arena for research<\/strong><\/p>\nHarmon says that the study is limited by the nature of NFL ticket sales.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeventy-five percent of NFL tickets are sold the season before,\u201d he notes, \u201cso we\u2019re only looking at 25% of overall ticket sales. So, there might have been other people who didn\u2019t physically go, but their tickets had already been sold.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study also did not include surveys of individual people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to look at correlations and then interpret them and say, well, this is a plausible scenario,\u201d Harmon says.<\/p>\n
The data is also limited by the relatively small sample size, Hwang says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe only have 32 weeks of game days,\u201d he says, \u201cand fans are pretty fixed as far as inflow of demand each season. Sports markets, we believe, are kind of inelastic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Additional study, they said, that looks at turnstile data \u2013 as opposed to ticket sales \u2013 might shed greater light on in-person impact.<\/p>\n
But at least for Harmon, this new-to-him area of research, embarked upon after a personal conversation, has already led to additional discussions with colleagues and a new area of inquiry for him.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s planning to take his behavioral economic research back to the sports arena to look at how response to unexpected sporting event outcomes, combined with political sentiment, can impact social and domestic issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s literature about the Super Bowl and follow-up articles about upset games and their relationship to spikes in domestic violence,\u201d Harmon says. \u201cThe little part of the literature that I want to tap into is how political polarization plays a role in fan response to game loss and incidents of domestic violence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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