Taking the L: NFL Super Bowl Outcomes and Governor Approval

• In Event: Papers That Study Voting Behavior With Clever Identification Strategies

Abstract

There is an extensive literature assessing and debating the multiple events and state conditions that voters hold political leaders accountable for, regardless of the political leaders ability to have any control over such events. Events such as the number of shark attacks in a year (Achen and Bartels 2012) and weather patterns (Gasper and Reeves 2011) show that voters hold the political leadership to some degree of accountability in everyday aspects of individual life. In general, we would think of these events as irrelevant events, as the political leaders have no control over the occurrence or result of the event. Studies have found links between sporting events, teams, and structures, and leadership tenure, increased nationalism, state identity, public policy, crowd disasters, and the development and redistribution of the economy. However, there has yet to be a study that directly analyzes the impact that the results that major sporting events in the United States, such as the Super Bowl, have on political leadership approval. We see an interaction between State leadership with their states sports teams when it comes to big games and events. Presidents and Governors host events for winning teams, congress people devote social media posts to their teams, political leaderships throw baseballs at Major League games. Does losing the Super Bowl affect the ways in which a constituency views their governor as being competent in office? I argue that the results of the Super Bowl are one of these irrelevant events that voters use to evaluate the success or failure of state leadership using ordered logistic regression, finding the outcomes of the Super Bowl do play a role in the approval rating of the States Governor.

Author

• Morgan Noel Smith, Georgia State University