Youth Sports, Gender, and Pathways to Political Involvement

Politics and sports are historically men’s games and domains. Increasingly, women have made strides both in participating in politics, running and holding office as well as competing in professional sports. Women athletes often lead the way in sports-related activism, for a variety of causes, including Black Lives Matter. In many ways, simply competing as a woman athlete is to inherently be an activist, as they continue to fight for equal resources and combat masculine institutions (e.g. FIFA, national team administrations).  Psychologically, participating in sports also facilitates comfortability with competition, solving collective action issues as a team, increases in self esteem, and bolstering other psychological resources and benefits that could help all children and young adults, but perhaps sports are particularly helpful for girls. We suggest that these resources could spill over into an interest and engagement in political and civic activities. For example, boys seem to enjoy politics because it is competitive, whereas girls favor more consensus-style politics, which could lead to different effects or strength of the effects between youth sport involvement and political engagement. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that physical and mental health are significantly related to political behaviour. Using 16 secondary datasets from 36 countries (total n =10,529), we investigate the relationships between sports and politics, particularly in comparison to other extracurricular activities that may build social capital but not develop sports-specific competencies. We also control for parental socioeconomic variables and find a pattern of results that suggest youth sport participation is associated with higher levels of political engagement, particularly for girls.  We cannot untangle causal effects from this data so it is possible that youth of particular backgrounds or dispositions self-select into both sports and politics. But this broad set of evidence suggests sport might be a potential pathway to prepare youth for political behaviour and calls for more research to uncover potential longitudinal effects of this activity.

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