Does sports success increase government support? Voter (ir)rationality in a multiparty context

Abstract

A growing number of studies discuss the impact of non-political factors on the political success of incumbents. Theoretically, this literature addresses core ideas about electoral accountability and voter rationality. Scholars have explored factors such as shark attacks, weather, natural disasters, and sports results. So far, the evidence has been inconclusive and almost exclusively from majoritarian contexts, where government accountability is easy for voters to assign. We contribute with an analysis of whether nationally important sports success, such as Olympic gold medals, affect support for coalition governments in a multiparty context. We use monthly polling from Finland for a 28-year period from Jan 1994 to Dec 2021, which we combine with data on sports success. Our analysis shows that nationally important sports success has no impact on government popularity. The finding holds while controlling for traditional drivers of government popularity and across different operationalizations of government support and sports success. With this finding, the study joins several previous analyses, which have been supportive of voter rationality.

Global Evidence for the Relevance of Irrelevant Events: International Soccer Games and Leader Approval

“…Although Busby and Druckman (2018) call for examining "under what conditions to irrelevant event effects occur" (9), the question remains open until very recently. Rapeli and Söderlund (2022) is the first study that has expanded the scope to a multiparty context of Finland, indicating that the Olympic Games did not affect government approval. Müller and Kneafsey (2023) has also extended the analysis to Gaelic football in Ireland, finding little evidence.…”

“…sightings (Kitamura 2022) are shown to influence elections and public opinion in the U.S., though the validity of the evidence is debated (Achen and Bartels 2018;Busby and Druckman 2018;Fowler and Hall 2016;Fowler and Montagnes 2015;Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2015). Recent studies have extended the analyses, especially those about sports events, to different times (Graham et al 2023b) and different countries such as Finland (Rapeli and Söderlund 2022), Ireland (Müller and Kneafsey 2023), and Spain (Alfano and Ercolano 2023), while the results remain mixed Montagnes 2023b, 2023a;Graham et al 2023a). Despite the extensive analyses, however, the literature is still confined to the U.S. and a few developed countries, neglecting the generalizability across countries.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first global test for the relevance of politically irrelevant events. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the U.S. (Achen and Bartels 2017;Graham et al 2023b;Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2010;Kitamura 2022) with exceptions existing in only a few developed countries (Alfano and Ercolano 2023;Müller and Kneafsey 2023;Rapeli and Söderlund 2022). While Kikuta and Uesugi (2023) have analyzed the effects of the European professional soccer games on protests and public opinion in Africa, their analysis is still confined to less than 15 countries in Africa.…”

“…As Müller and Kneafsey (2023) state in the conclusion, "examining the robustness of high-profile findings across different case contexts is key to determining the factors that may condition the impact of irrelevant events" (325). Similarly, Rapeli and Söderlund (2022) argue that "[w]hile some scholars question whether looking for political effects of non-political events is a meaningful exercise, there is still room for more contextual variety in the analyses before the idea should be dismissed" (7).…”

What determines voting behavior to host the Olympic games in the Rhine-Ruhr area: a multilevel model

“…To the best of our knowledge, all research on individual voting behavior in the sports context has focused on personal factors, such as the inclination to vote in favor of subsidies for constructing new stadiums and arenas ( 4 – 6 ), the increase in political support through sport ( 7 ), and the voting behavior in a referendum on a mega-event ( 8 , 9 ). Following the failed referenda in Germany for the 2018 and 2022 Winter OG in Munich and the 2024 Summer OG in Hamburg, Menge et al ( 10 ) assessed the willingness to pay for the potential hosting of the 2036 OG within the population of the Rhine-Ruhr (RR) region.…”