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Economics of Governance
Published in: Economics of Governance 3-4/2022

04-02-2022 | Original Paper

United we feel stronger? On the Olympics and political ideology

Authors: Josh Matti, Yang Zhou

Published in: Economics of Governance | Issue 3-4/2022

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Abstract

Collective ideologies are a feature of the Olympic Games as individual athletes represent entire nations. Prior research has explored one dimension of Olympic ideology, finding a link between national pride and hosting the Olympics. This paper extends the literature by considering a wider variety of ideological indicators, including willingness to fight for country, confidence in government, and beliefs about different political systems. The results using a series of global surveys across several decades suggest that success at the Olympics and hosting of the Olympics does not guarantee greater citizen support or government legitimacy. Performance in the Summer Olympics has no consistent effect on the ideological views of survey respondents. In terms of hosting the Summer Olympics, host nations experience an increase in willingness to fight but a decrease in government confidence. These effects vary based upon the level of democratic quality of the host nations.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
For more details on this, Zhou (2021) provides a detailed review of the cognitive nature of ideology and institutions.
 
5
We also conduct the analysis with total medal count. The results are similar and available upon request.
 
6
Clustering standard errors at the country-wave level is not appropriate due to the small number of waves in the sample.
 
7
Although there are no Summer Olympics host nations taking the WVS in their Olympic hosting year, it is still important to consider the lagged effect because other countries competing in the Olympics take the WVS in Olympic years.
 
8
For example, comparing the four Summer Olympics and four Winter Olympics between 2002–2016, each Summer Olympics has more global TV viewers than each Winter Olympics: https://​www.​statista.​com/​statistics/​287966/​olympic-games-tv-viewership-worldwide/​.
 
9
For example, the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, Brazil had more than 11,000 athletes from 207 National Olympic Committees (NOCs), but the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea had only 2,914 athletes from 92 NOCs.
 
10
South Korea may or may not have a WVS following hosting as the hosting and survey year are both 2018.
 
11
Another possibility is that the Summer and Winter Olympics are simply different events, particularly in regard to costs. For example, Flyvbjerg et al. (2020) shows that Summer Olympics hosting typically costs 2–3 times more than Winter Olympics hosting.
 
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Metadata
Title
United we feel stronger? On the Olympics and political ideology
Authors
Josh Matti
Yang Zhou
Publication date
04-02-2022
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Economics of Governance / Issue 3-4/2022
Print ISSN: 1435-6104
Electronic ISSN: 1435-8131
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-022-00265-2

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