College Football: A Different Type of Partisanship

Now that it’s election season, a person’s political party is more telling than it usually is. “The public’s interest in party politics climbs as elections draw near, but partisan self-conceptions remain intact during peaks and lulls in party competition” (pg 5). Every four years, your party affiliation is moved up the list as one of the main things you would use to describe yourself. A comparable phenomenon is college football season. Any other time of the year, you know which team you root for, but it’s not a priority when defining yourself. In the fall once your team starts playing, you bleed your team’s colors. It’s all you can talk about, and you defend your team as if you personally know every player and the coaches.

When does all of this madness start? In both politics and sports occurrences, “partisan attachments form relatively early in adulthood.” (pg 4) Kids listen to their parents discuss politics, or cheer on a certain sports team, and they start to form their own decisions based off of what they experience.

The way we choose to look at politics (or choose not to look at politics) brings about a multitude of questions. Why do we stick with our first affiliation decision, when we make it at such a young age? From personal experience, I believe that the decision is made based on whether or not we agree with our parents, and the social stigmas that surround each political party.

There has also been a decline in the general public’s interest in politics, and how it affects society. If that’s the case, wouldn’t that also lead to “the decline of sociologically based voting… apparent for the class and religious cleavages…”(pg 937)? Presumably a decline in political interest would lead to a decline in the stigmas surrounding political parties and how that would affect other aspects of a person’s life. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Even with an overall decline, “there has been no comprehensive decline in the social bases of political alignments in the United States.” (pg 944) It seems as if a person’s party affiliation will remain with them throughout their lives, regardless of changing opinions about certain political parties or a lack of interest in politics overall.