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This article compares women's sport advocacy groups in Canada and the United States from an institutionalist perspective. Women's sport advocacy groups address similar issues and have similar mandates in both countries, but yet differ markedly in their evolution and strategy choices. We seek to understand the extent to which their institutional environment constrains and/or enables group strategies to enhance our understanding of which factors influence advocacy organizations in the sport policy sector. The article concludes by arguing that institutional, cultural, and economic factors as well as differences in the political opportunity structure (POS) help explain the differences in the development and strategy choices of women's sport advocacy groups in both countries.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how fans of women’s sport are using Instagram to self-represent their fandom. It uses the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup (WWC) as a case study to examine the ways in which fans at a women’s sport event express their fandom through images and to consider the social and political dimensions of using Instagram for promoting women’s sport. Instagram pictures containing the event-related hashtags #FIFAWWC, #LiveYourGoals, #SheBelieves, and #CanadaRed were collected over the tournament duration. From a content analysis of 3,605 images, the authors argue that visual networked platforms are facilitating online communication conventions within sport fan communities that function as forms of social presence to legitimate women’s participation as fans and generate visibility for women’s sport. By demonstrating that the production and sharing of visual content related to sport events have become important features of the contemporary sport fan experience, this article advocates for greater recognition of social media practices alongside conventional measures of sport fan engagement.

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