National pride, sporting success and event hosting: an analysis of intangible effects related to major athletic tournaments

ABSTRACT

Contemporary research into the impact of major sports events shows that the widely used (and popular) claim of economic benefits associated with hosting them is misleading or – at best – overrated. In this paper, we aim to measure whether other potential intangible effects can be found, specifically that of national pride. We expand on existing research by including more international sports events and nations while also including a medal index into our regression models to test the effect of athletic achievement. Our results suggest that international sporting success is not a significant driver of national pride. Hosting mega sports events is positively correlated with pride, although this is not significant in our estimations. Implications for nations are that they should become much more strategic in order to harvest potential intangible effects. (JEL: D60; I31)

KEYWORDS:

• National pride
• International Sporting Success
• mega sport events
• economic impact
• intangible effects

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘White elephants’ is a metaphor for large (‘oversized’) and expensive stadiums, which are built in connection to major sports events and that are difficult to utilise subsequently. Because their ex ante and ex post costs are so big in relation to their use, they thus represent a welfare economic cost to society. Refer to Alm et al. (2014) for a more thorough understanding of this phenomenon.

2. It should be mentioned, though, that some newer studies (e.g. Pfitzner and Koenigstorfer 2016, Schlegel et al. 2017, Oja et al. 2018) also examine whether the ‘ particular atmosphere perceived by host city residents during the hosting of a mega sport event contributes to subjective well-being’ (p. 606) thus leaving out the sporting success aspect.

3. The World Values Survey is provided by a non-commercial global network of social scientists, and covers almost 100 countries, that is, close to 90 percent of the world’s population. It has run since 1981. Web: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp.

4. https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/.

5. The question asked in relation to the variable national pride is ‘How proud are you to be [nationality]?’ with the answers ranging from (1) ‘Not at all proud’ (4) to ‘Very proud’. Ethnic aversion relates to the question ‘In this list are various groups of people. Could you please indicate any that you would not like to have as neighbours?’, where respondents who indicated ‘People of a different race’ have been given the value 1.

6. Our analysis cover men’s sporting events only.

7. For a list of the countries in our dataset which are included together with scores on at least one of the four main independent variables, see Appendix A1. For a list of scores associated with different placements in the events, see Appendix A2. Note that the score of hosting an event equals that of winning (or having the best medal score) in an event. If the event is shared by two countries, the main host acquires 75% of that score while the junior host acquires 25%. If it is shared between three or more, the senior acquires 75% and the others each acquire 50% of the score. For the Cricket World Cup in the West Indies, all the host countries acquire 1/3 of the score except the country hosting the final, which acquires 50%.

8. We use the World Development Indicators data base: https://data.worldbank.org.

9. We have also run models including level-1 GINI coefficient data showing that unequal societies generally have higher levels of national pride. The drawback of this variable is its limited N, which means that the number of countries in our analysis is reduced from 96 to 61, and the number of country-survey-years from 253 to 113. We have thus chosen to keep GINI coefficient data out of the final models.

10. We see from the Appendix Table A2 that Germany and Japan score low on national pride. When taking into account their high scores on our two main independent variables, we argue that it makes sense to test the multilevel models while controlling for these as well as excluding them from the model. This is not necessary in the fixed effects models.

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not receive any funding for the research presented in this paper.