Does national pride from international sporting success contribute to well-being? An international investigation

Highlights

•	One specific aspect of public policy is to argue that investment in international sporting success creates pride from success, which contributes to subjective well-being.
•	This paper addresses this hypothesis by focusing on a variable which directly measures pride felt from sporting success to control for possible endogeneity.
•	The findings suggest that the hosting of events may be more important than success at them.
•	Therefore, the goals of public sector investment in elite sports are shown to be more distinct than implied in much of the policy literature.

Abstract

The sports industry is viewed as being of growing economic significance, reflected in its promotion in public policy. One specific aspect of this policy is to argue that investment in international sporting success creates pride from sporting success, which contributes to subjective well-being (SWB). However, though it has been argued that indicators of sporting success, such as the number of medals won at major sports events like the Olympics, act as a proxy for pride from sporting success, there have not been any direct tests of this hypothesis. Controlling for the impact of physical activity, attendance at sports events and other standard covariates, this paper addresses this hypothesis by focusing on a variable which directly measures pride felt from sporting success (Pride) by individuals. Because of the possibility that a latent characteristic such as nationalism, or overall national pride, might be linked to both Pride and SWB, i.e. an endogeneity problem is present, an instrumental variable technique is employed. The findings do not support the hypothesis that pride following from sporting success can contribute distinctly to SWB. Moreover, the hosting of events may be more important than success at them, a point suggested by the positive association between attendance at sporting events and SWB. As such the goals of public sector investment in both hosting major sports events as well as investment in sports development to achieve international sporting success are shown to be more distinct than implied in much of the policy announcements and require more careful scrutiny.

Keywords:

• Sport events
• Sporting success
• Subjective well-being
• Pride
• Instrumental variable

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the editor, Tracy Taylor, and two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions significantly improved the article.

Notes

1 Pride from sporting success could be a component of national pride, but not have a direct relationship with SWB. In contrast, national pride and SWB could be linked – not because of sport but because of other (non-)sport components. For instance, citizens might have pride because of health service provision in their country and the health service contributes to their SWB.

2 From an empirical perspective, a variety of measurements of SWB have been employed. The most common measures of well-being in the economics literature have included statements about the respondents’ happiness (for example, Blanchflower & Oswald, 2004; Golden & Wiens-Tuers, 2006; Shields et al., 2009) or satisfaction with life as a whole (for example Frijters et al., 2011; Gardner & Oswald, 2006; Winkelmann, 2005; Winkelmann & Winkelmann, 1998). SWB has also been measured by aggregating categories of well-being. For example, Brown et al. (2005) and Gardner and Oswald (2006) have made use of the General Health Questionnaire 12 Score (GHQ12), developed by Goldberg (1972). In effect this paper assesses if pride is a component of such measures. If not then reference to such pride has little value to discussions connected to social welfare as addressed by SWB.

3 At the time of writing data from Denmark and the Netherlands were not available.

4 In this study these variables were originally coded as 1 = very happy…4 = not happy at all; 1 = I am very proud…4 = I am not proud at all. They were reordered to make the magnitude more ‘logical’.

5 It could be argued that Spmoney is more likely to be related to Happy than Pride. For example, government spending on facilities could increase access for citizens and hence Happy. However, our instrument is about “spending on sports” in general and not only sport facilities. In many countries, moreover, the availability of sports facilities is largely independent of government funding and spending on sport as they are delivered by the private sector. We argue that it is reasonable to assume that if you feel pride from sporting success you would like to see the government spending more money on sports. Or: those who think that governments should spend more money on sport probably feel pride from sporting success. This theoretical conjecture plus the empirical results in the paper (see Section 5) add confidence to this argument.

6 Please note that following Hair et al. (1998) VIF values bigger than 10 indicate serious multicollinearity problems. Since (beside the highly correlated variables age and agesq) the highest VIF value measures 4.3, multicollinearity is also not a problem in our study.