A League of Their Own: an Exploration of Fandom, Identity, and Political Behavior
This dissertation examines political fandom as a dimension of political social identity, investigating its relationships with political participation, social media engagement, and affective polarization. Scholarship has long analyzed partisan and ideological beliefs through Social Identity Theory, but the growing emotional attachment to individual politicians highlights the need to consider political fandom as an important construct for examining political behavior. While partisan and ideological social identities primarily manifest through traditional political behaviors, fandom drives expressive behaviors like social media engagement. This dissertation explicates political fandom and its relationship to various political behaviors such as traditional political participation, political consumerism, and social media political engagement. Through a cross-sectional survey of 591 U.S. adults, this research demonstrates that political fandom functions as a unique yet interrelated dimension of political social identity alongside partisan and ideological social identities. Linear discriminant and hierarchical regression analyses reveal political fandom as the strongest predictor of traditional political participation and expressive social media engagement, whereas ideological social identity is the most significant predictor of political consumerism. Political fandom explains significant additional variance in participation outcomes beyond partisan and ideological identities. However, unlike these established identities, political fandom shows no significant relationship with affective polarization. These results extend current theoretical conceptualizations of political social identity by establishing fandom as a unique dimension that drives political behavior beyond partisan or ideological alignment.
Political Fandom, Political Participation, Social Identity Theory, Social Media
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