The impact of ownership political ideology on firm performance: evidence from major league baseball (MLB) franchises

ABSTRACT

This paper utilises the political ideology literature in conjunction with frameworks of sport ownership to investigate the link between franchise owners’ political ideology and organisation-level performance outcomes. A sample of 300 PSF-year observations tied to 43 unique owners was used to investigate the proposed relationships. The results do not support the idea that an owner’s political leanings impact many facets of how the PSF is managed. However, and contradictory to what was hypothesised, it is shown that liberal owners are associated with a higher cost of attendance, controlling for a range of other factors at the owner, team, city, league, and national levels. The results provide a foundation that can inform the continued discussion of powerful stakeholder groups and how their ideologies impact the strategic management of their organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ideology
• ownership
• finance
• performance
• baseball

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In unreported robustness checks, the analysis used two alternate Turnover thresholds: 15% and 17.5%. Neither of the alternate thresholds changed the reported results.