Youth Sports, Gender, and Pathways to Political Involvement

Politics and sports are historically men’s domains. Increasingly, women have made strides in participating in politics, running for office, and competing in professional sports. Psychologically, participating in sports facilitates comfortability with competition, solving collective action issues as a team, increases in self-esteem, and bolstering other psychological resources. We suggest that these resources could spillover into an interest and engagement in political and civic activities. Using 8 secondary datasets across dozens of countries, we investigate the relationships between sports and politics by gender. 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. This broad set of evidence suggests sport might be a potential pathway to prepare youth for political behavior and calls for more research to uncover potential longitudinal effects of this activity.