The Global Sociology Blog

Robert Braun and Rens Vliegenthart, The Contentious Fans – The Impact of Repression, Media Coverage, Grievances and Aggressive Play on Supporters’ Violence, International Sociology, Vol. 23 (6), November 2008, pp. 796 – 919.

This article is interesting but I would not recommend it for undergraduate students. The data and method section would fly over their heads and I don’t think they would be ready for the refinements of sophisticated statistical analysis (what with β and γ). Because it offers some interesting points on the phenomenon of hooliganism, it might be worth some supported reading, but cannot be thrown at undergrad students without some major explaining. That being said, what are the interesting points?

Dismissing already debunked explanations for collective violence, such as irrationality and rather than focusing on the existence of hooliganism as social phenomenon indicative of de-civilization or masculine working-class culture, the authors focus here rather on the social conditions in which hooligan violence is more or less likely to occur. Rather than treat hooliganism as a static phenomenon, they examine the dynamics that explain the temporal patterns of violence.

The focus is therefore on four factors that explain the variations in hooligan violence and formulate four hypotheses. The factors are as follows:

"First, we test grievance theories that argue that collective violence follows from frustrations resulting from economic deprivation (Gurr, 1970; Piven and Cloward, 1979). Second, we consider the political process theory that holds that the intensity of collective action, in general, and collective  violence, specifically, is dependent on the room the ‘political’ structures leave for these forms of contention to take place (Kriesi et al., 1995; McAdam, 1982). Third, we test media explanations of collective actions, which contend that violent mobilization (Koopmans and Olzak, 2004), similar to other forms of contention (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993), is related to media coverage. Finally, we take a closer look at social learning theory of collective violence, which claims that violent incidents are inspired by aggressive behaviour of significant others (Bandura, 1973; Pitcher et al., 1978) – soccer players in the case of hooliganism." (798)

This covers a lot of familiar ground in social movement theories (file that as part of Fabio Rojas’s low consensus thesis) from relative deprivation (interaction between collective behavior or social movement and the economic or stratification systems) to political process (interaction between collective behavior or social movement and the polity and other non-state institutions such as the media) to more "classical" social learning theories reminiscent of Mead.

As a result, it becomes clear that seemingly "irrational" collective violence is actually claim-making contentious behavior, that is, expression of discontent involving strong senses of identities that may or may not be politically-grounded. These combine to create a strong sense of "us" versus "them" with the corresponding need to humiliate "them". And since hooliganism has a definite element of performance violence, it seems obvious that such performance relates to media coverage.

So, the hypotheses are as follows:

(H1a) Repression of hooliganism positively influences the level of supporters’ violence. And (H1b) Repression of hooliganism negatively influences the level of supporters’ violence. [That's kinda cheating, isn't it?]

(H2) The amount of media coverage of hooliganism positively influences the level of supporters’ violence.

(H3) It is not so much the absolute level of unemployment, but rather increases in unemployment rates that lead to more supporter violence.

(H4) Soccer players’ aggression on the pitch has a positive effect on the occurrence of supporters’ violence.

The results based on Dutch soccer data: police repression has no significant effect on hooligan violence (both H1a and H1b are out). On the other hand, hooligan violence in the previous weeks increases the probability of violence in the following matches (H2 is confirmed). Increases in unemployment among young males increases soccer violence (confirming H3). And finally, aggressive play increases the probability of fan violence.

What the authors emphasize with this study and results is that hooligan violence has to be understood as embedded in social contexts (economic and media but not state repression or political opportunities) in which social learning is significant. Therefore, explanations of soccer violence based more or less exclusively on old-fashioned social contagion-type theories or on individuals’ traits are incomplete at best. Such explanations cannot explain why soccer fans violence increases as the economy deteriorates or as media coverage increases or as aggressive play takes place.