Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

2020/04/28 by Emilio Depetris-Chauvín, Ruben Durante, Filipe Campante · 2 voices · 239 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Civil Conflict #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Economic growth #Economics #Ethnic group #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Football #Football team #Law #National identity #Political science #Spanish Civil War #Sports Analytics and Performance #Victory

paper · pdf · doi:10.1257/aer.20180805

published in American Economic Review 110(5), 1572-1602 (American Economic Association)

openalex publication_date 2020/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

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)

Citations

• Introducing ACLED: An Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset
• Biases in Dynamic Models with Fixed Effects
• Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

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Discussions

• Day 1/39 After their national team's big wins, Africans identify less by ethnicity, trust other groups more, and see less civil conflict — shared experiences help build national identity. Depetris-C [bsky, 17 points, 0 comments]
• For whoever does end up writing it, doi.org/10.1257/aer.... is a good one [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]

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