The paper "Building Nations Through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football" by Ruben Durante (UPF and Barcelona GSE) and co-authors Filipe Campante and Emilio Depetris-Chauvin is forthcoming in the American Economic review.
The authors explore whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. They find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their country’s national team are 37% less likely to identify primarily with their ethnic group, and 30% 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% fewer episodes) in the following months than countries that (barely) did not.
