ABSTRACT

Research question

Despite significantly increasing membership in professional football clubs over time, few members exercise their right to vote. We explore whether factors found to influence turnout to shareholder voting and political elections are also relevant in this peculiar setting. Given the geographically widespread distribution of members, a particular focus is put on the relevance of travel distance to the meeting place.

Research methods

Data come from an online survey of n = 9090 voting-eligible members of one of the biggest football clubs in Germany. A member’s ‘habit for voting’ serves as dependent variable in our regression models. Given the ordinal nature of this variable, ordered probit models were estimated which allow addressing the size and relevance of non-instrumental benefits from voting.

Results and findings

Next to some setting-specific variables, we find that several socio-demographic characteristics have statistically significant effects on the members’ habit for voting. Also in line with the general voting literature, the distance between one’s home and the meeting place is significantly and negatively related to the probability of voting. Remarkably, however, this effect is hardly big enough to materially change the habit for voting.

Implications

Our study provides some evidence of ‘temporal consistency’ and ‘setting independency’ for the factors associated with voter turnout. At the same time, it illustrates a practically highly relevant case where statistical and economic significance of a variable differ. Since the effect of distance between one’s home and the meeting place is comparably small, online voting or voting by mail might have little impact on turnout in practice.

中文翻译：

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职业足球决策：俱乐部成员投票行为的实证分析

摘要

研究问题

尽管随着时间的推移，职业足球俱乐部的会员数量大幅增加，但很少有会员行使投票权。我们探讨了影响股东投票和政治选举投票率的因素是否也与这种特殊环境相关。鉴于成员的地理分布广泛，因此特别关注与会议地点的旅行距离的相关性。

研究方法

数据来自对 德国最大足球俱乐部之一的n = 9090 名符合投票资格的会员进行的在线调查。成员的“投票习惯”在我们的回归模型中充当因变量。考虑到该变量的序数性质，估计了有序概率模型，该模型可以解决投票带来的非工具性收益的规模和相关性。

结果和发现

除了一些特定环境变量之外，我们发现一些社会人口特征对成员的投票习惯具有统计上的显着影响。同样与一般投票文献一致的是，家和聚会地点之间的距离与投票概率呈显着负相关。然而值得注意的是，这种影响还不足以实质性地改变投票习惯。

影响

我们的研究为与选民投票率相关的因素提供了“时间一致性”和“设定独立性”的一些证据。同时，它说明了一个与实际高度相关的案例，其中变量的统计意义和经济意义不同。由于住所与聚会地点之间的距离影响较小，实际中网络投票或邮寄投票对投票率的影响可能不大。