Political regime and the impact of sporting success on national pride: a quasi-natural experiment in Germany

ABSTRACT

This study aims to identify the impact of sporting success on national pride. Scholars have examined the association between elite sports and national sentiment. However, the association between the impact of successful elite sports on national pride and the influence of past political regimes remains uncertain. This study examines how the national pride of Germans changed with the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil by analysing the social survey data of the German General Social Survey 2014. This research analyses the fluctuation of general national pride and sport-related national pride through sports events. Germany is selected as an ideal context for research. Because the German national team won the 2014 FIFA World Cup, comparative analysis of East and West Germans allows to consider the influence of past sport-related national identity policy on current residents during an event that involved victory in a sport. The results show that both East and West Germans experienced increased feelings of sport-related national pride during the World Cup. Furthermore, East Germans’ sport-related national pride increased slightly more than West German after they witnessed the success of national athletes in the World Cup. However, general national pride decreased slightly from before the World Cup to after the event. Thus, the impact of sporting success on national pride depends on past sport policy, but the influence of past political regime is small. And the impact of sporting success is restricted to the sport-related domain of national pride.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport-related national pride
• socialist regime
• World Cup
• East Germany
• West Germany

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The data analysed by Elling et al. (2014) are not from a longitudinal survey. Cross-sectional sampling was conducted in each wave.

2. In some research, different questions were used to measure sport-related national pride (e.g., Seippel 2017, Meier and Mutz 2018). Meier and Mutz (2018) also employed ISSP National Identity 2013 and measured a type of sport-related national pride through the item ‘When my country does well in international sports, it makes me proud to be [COUNTRY NATIONALITY]’. However, the majority of previous studies that discuss domain-specific national pride used an item that asked, ‘how proud are you of your country’s achievement in sports?’ (Hjerm 1998, Evans and Kelley 2002, Smith 2006); thus, I selected this item for use in this research.

3. Income is also a well-known indicator of social status, and ALLBUS 2014 asks respondents to indicate their income levels. However, many respondents did not disclose their incomes, and many samples are omitted if income is included as one of the control variables. Thus, this study did not take respondents’ income into account in the analysis.

4. The t-test utilises Welch’s degree of freedom.