- Title Information
- Title
- A Tale of Two Mayors: Dave Bing, Kevin Johnson, and the Rise of Athletes-Turned-Politicians
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Coburn-Palo, Nicholas Jericho
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2014
- Physical Description
- Extent
- viii, 236 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Morone, James
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Brettschneider, Corey
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Jones-Luong, Pauline
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Political Science
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- The implicit and explicit political significance of sports is often underestimated; sports functions as an ideational community linking together millions of Americans, as well as producing candidates elected to over a half-dozen major public offices in the last decade alone. The question contemplated by my project is why has the influence of sports in American politics grown? The notion of how sports functions in relation to the political, and celebrity politics in particular, has been largely neglected by the field of political science. My project seeks to address that deficiency. My research suggests that the rising influence of sports and the rise of celebrity in politics over the past century have arrived at a near perfect “fit” in the status quo. Theoretical implications suggested by such connectivity include the following: 1) that the pathways to success in celebrity politics have been influenced by the fit between candidates and emerging campaign/media approaches; 2) that the current fit between celebrity politics and ascending media has created conditions favorable to candidates with a background in forms of celebrity such as sports; 3) that sports is an especially robust form of celebrity insofar as it taps into sources of bridging and bonding social capital, with potentially important political implications; 4) that the increasing influence of sports in politics might transcend a simple signal of rejection of status quo politics, instead reflecting a source of meaningful agency by a restive public. The case studies are an attempt to operationalize the concepts described in the first section, by examining a specific manifestation of the influence of sports in American politics: electoral politics. I will consider the cases of athletes-turned-politicians at the mayoral level, which I believe might illustrate the theoretical possibilities suggested earlier in the project. In considering the cases of Dave Bing and Kevin Johnson, race and the imagined community of spectator sports are brought into play in considering the process by which celebrity politics is activated as a political impulse for both first and second wave athletes-turned-politicians.
- Subject
- Topic
- athletes-turned-politicians
- Subject
- Topic
- celebrity
- Subject
- Topic
- politics
- Subject
- Topic
- social capital
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/920123")
- Topic
- Fame
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1130432")
- Topic
- Sports
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1069781")
- Topic
- Political science
- Subject (FAST)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1122281")
- Topic
- Social capital (Sociology)
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20141006
- Language
- Language Term:
Code (ISO639-2B)
- eng
- Language Term:
Text
- English
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.7301/Z07D2SGX
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations