Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

Abstract

We examine whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their country’s national team are 37 percent less likely to identify primarily with their ethnic group, and 30 percent more likely to trust other ethnicities, than those interviewed just before. Crucially, national team achievements also reduce violence: countries that (barely) qualified to the Africa Cup of Nations experience less civil conflict (9 percent fewer episodes) in the following months than countries that (barely) did not. (JEL D74, J15, L83, O15, O17, Z21)

Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles

“…1 Clotfelter (2015) details the extent of fans' devotions and their emotional ties to college teams. 2 By special permission from Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Youth Services, Office of Juvenile Justice, we obtained access to the universe of defendant files from 1996 to 2012. For each file, we have basic demographic 1 Describing LSU football just as an event would be a huge understatement for the residents of the state of Louisiana.…”

“…Moreover, around 216 million viewers tuned in to watch the regular college football season with another 126 million watching the bowl games (National Football Foundation 2013). 2 A number of papers have investigated the impact sports activities on outcomes ranging from crime to disease prevalence (Stoecker, Sanders, and Barreca 2016;Kirby, Francis, and O'Flaherty 2014;Munyo and Rossi 2013;Campaniello 2013;Rees and Schnepel 2009). The mechanisms behind these effects range from frustration/happiness and consumption of alcohol due to game results to the infusion of people into the local area and crowding due to the sports event.…”

External Threat, Group Identity, and Support for Common Policies – The Effect of the Russian Invasion in Ukraine on European Union Identity

“…The first contribution of this paper is to the emerging economics literature identifying causal sources of changes in identity using observational data. Depetris-Chauvin et al (2019) show how shared experiences can foster a common national identity and reduce the risk of internal conflict, focusing on the effect of sport events. Fouka (2020) shows how repressive policies against an immigrant group in a foreign country can strengthen the identity of that group.…”

The construction of national identities

“…On the empirical side, some papers study the impact of different nation‐building tools, such as language policy (Aspachs‐Bracons et al (), Caminal et al ()), school curricula (Cantoni et al (), Fouka ()), compulsory schooling (Bandiera et al ()), mass media and propaganda (Voigtländer and Voth (), Blouin and Mukand ()), public nationalist holidays (Madestam and Yanagizawa‐Drott ()), and national football teams (Depetris‐Chauvin et al ()). We contribute to this literature by developing a theoretical model that explores the long‐run consequences of these policies and the political economy aspects that constrain their implementation.…”