Professors Oskar Harmon and Jungbin Hwang are featured in the current edition of UConn Today:
Home or Away? NFL Stadium Attendance Protest Impact Depended on Who Visited, Researchers Find
How do player politics affect fan attendance? The answer is complicated
Research inspiration can come from any number of places.
For Oskar Harmon, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at UConn, a recently published paper was inspired by a conversation with a friend.
About football.
“One of my close friends said they were no longer going to watch NFL games,” Harmon explains. “I was a bit surprised, because he’s normally open to different points of view. So that’s what motivated me.”
What discouraged Harmon’s friend was the widely publicized NFL player protests during televised U.S. national anthem proceedings at the start of games.
Player protests, notes Harmon, became one of the most visible controversies facing the NFL during the 2016 and 2017 seasons, as players like the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat or kneeled as the anthem was played live on network television.
In 2018, major broadcast networks discontinued live coverage of national anthem ceremonies, greatly reducing visibility of player protests. But the interest in what happened in 2016 and 2017 didn’t wane for Harmon.
“I was looking at how television ratings changed during the protests,” Harmon explains, “and I was really surprised that no one was asking about what happened inside the stadiums. Do all people feel so strongly that they’re not going to go to the games? Because people are very committed to football. And I didn’t see anybody in the literature looking at it.”
Despite media reports of a decline in television viewership and attendance at NFL games amidst the protests, academic research has been limited.
In a review of published studies, Harmon found that a few looked at television viewership responses to the anthem protests, but none examined in-stadium game attendance.
Harmon, who studies consumer behavior and behavioral economics and is a football fan himself – “And I’m very, very, very disappointed in the Giants,” he quips, “but I still watch their games” – partnered with fellow associate professor Jungbin Hwang, an econometrics researcher who uses statistical and mathematical theory to analyze economic data, to see what happened to NFL stadium game-day attendance during the height of the NFL protests in 2016 and 2017.
Their findings were recently published in the June edition of the Southern Economic Journal.
Read the full article at UConn Today:
Home or Away? NFL Stadium Attendance Protest Impact Depended on Who Visited, Researchers Find