A new study suggests that watching athletes and coaches graciously concede defeat on television can make voters more willing to accept unfavourable election results, bolstering the sense that the process was fair.
Led by Alex Tolkin, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the research explores legitimating rituals—public acts that signal a contest was conducted fairly.
Tolkin notes these rituals exist in both politics and sport: concessions, handshakes, and inaugurations in politics; post‑game handshakes and defeat acknowledgements in sport.
Drawing on social learning theory, the study argues people learn how to behave by observing role models such as professional athletes and coaches.
The paper contrasts the regulated environment of sport, where leagues mandate decorum and sanction unfavourable remarks about officials, with political life, where no central body enforces concession traditions.
In the panel analysis, 2,625 participants were surveyed shortly before the 2020 presidential election and again in April 2021, measuring intended vote, frequency of watching team sports and beliefs about election fairness.
The findings show that after the 2020 election, supporters of the winning candidate grew more confident in the election’s fairness, while supporters of the losing candidate registered a decline.
Crucially, among losing-support voters, those who frequently watched team sports showed a smaller drop in belief that the election was fair than those who watched less.
Watching sports emerged as a stronger predictor of this attitude shift than consumption of political media.
Tolkin then ran a controlled experiment with around 1,000 self-identified Democrats or Republicans, designed to manipulate the displayed rituals.
Participants were divided into groups that either watched a summary of a basketball game with a defeated coach giving a post‑game press conference or skipped sports content; all read about a fictional Jacksonville mayoral election, selected a candidate and explained their choice.
After learning that their chosen candidate had lost narrowly, some watched a video of a concession speech in which the defeated candidate appeared to concede; the speech used AI voice cloning to dub in the appropriate name.
The results showed that viewing the defeated politician concede increased belief in the election’s legitimacy, even though the video concerned only a sports event.
Watching the sports concession speech also caused participants to view the political loss as more legitimate, though the effect was roughly half the size of the political concession.
The researchers emphasise that the overall effect was additive when participants were exposed to both sports and political rituals.
There are caveats, including that the 2020 election featured a losing candidate who refused to participate in concession rituals, and the panel data cannot definitively prove causation; the experimental results, however, establish a direct link between watching rituals and accepting defeat.
In the study, participants evaluated a fictional election, and their opinions may be more malleable than in real-world politics, where partisan loyalties are deeply entrenched.
The study also measured sports viewership rather than emotional fandom, and some differences emerged by political affiliation. Republicans in the study showed lower overall belief in election legitimacy than Democrats, and the sports concession effect was about half as large for Republicans as for Democrats.
The study, “Good Sports or Sore Losers: Sports Fans and Perceptions of Election Legitimacy,” was authored by Alex Tolkin.
