Team and Nation: Sports, Nationalism, and Attitudes Toward Refugees

• Author: Leah R. Rosenzweig,Yang-Yang Zhou
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997498
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(12) 2123 –2154

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997498

Comparative Political Studies

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997498

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Article

Team and Nation:

Sports, Nationalism,

and Attitudes Toward

Refugees

Leah R. Rosenzweig1 and Yang-Yang Zhou2¶

Abstract

How do major national events influence attitudes toward non-nationals?

Recent research suggests that national sports team wins help foster

national pride, weaken ethnic attachments, and build trust among conational

out-group members. This paper asks a related question: By heightening

nationalism, do these victories also affect attitudes toward foreign out-groups,

specifically refugees? We examine this question using the 2019 Africa Cup

football match between Kenya and Tanzania, which Kenya narrowly won,

coupled with an online survey experiment conducted with a panel of 2,647

respondents recruited through Facebook. We find that winning increases

national pride and preferences for resource allocation toward conationals,

but it also leads to negative views of refugees’ contribution to the country’s

diversity. However, we present experimental evidence that reframing

national sports victories as a product of cooperation among diverse players

and highlighting shared superordinate identities can offset these views and

help foster positive attitudes toward refugees.

1Stanford University, CA, USA

2University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

¶Authors contributed equally. Author order randomized using https://randomizeauthor.

shinyapps.io/shiny.

Corresponding Author:

Yang-Yang Zhou, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 323 C.K.

Choi Building 1855 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.

Email: yangyang.zhou@ubc.ca

997498CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997498Comparative Political StudiesRosenzweig and Zhou

research-article2021

2124 Comparative Political Studies 54(12)

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Keywords

nationalism, sports, refugees, intergroup relations, difference-in-differences,

Tanzania, Kenya

Introduction

How do major national events affect citizens’ attitudes toward foreigners?

Independence day celebrations, the Olympics, and other cultural events have

been shown to increase national identity and pride (e.g., Billig, 1995; Billings

et al., 2013; Lau et al., 2012). While the comparative politics literature gener-

ally considers nationalism to be a beneficial resource for improving inter-

group relations and fostering nation building (Anderson, 1982; Miguel, 2004;

Robinson, 2016), this view stands in stark contrast to studies which demon-

strate that nationalism can intensify or reinforce xenophobia (Berezin, 2006;

Sniderman et al., 2004; Wimmer, 2002). The narrow focus on national iden-

tification as it pertains to intergroup relations between subnational groups

overlooks potential costs associated with increased nationalism related to

attitudes and behaviors toward foreigners.

This paper centers on the important, yet understudied, question of how

national events, specifically sports games, engender nationalism and influ-

ence views toward migrants living in the nation’s borders. Extending the lit-

erature on nationalism and sports, we adopt a micro-level focus centered on

a critical dependent variable not generally incorporated in the existing empir-

ical work—attitudes toward refugees. Drawing on social identity theory, we

theorize that if enhancing national identification shifts the referent out-group

from subnational “others” to those beyond state borders, we might wonder

whether events that galvanize nationalism affect attitudes toward non-nation-

als (Brewer, 1999; Tajfel, 1981). Using the context of an international sports

competition, we examine how a national team victory influences attitudes

toward refugees. In particular, we explore whether nationalism induced by

these cultural events is inherently exclusive, or whether it need not co-occur

with negative feelings toward refugees—a salient and often stigmatized for-

eign out-group.

As levels of forced displacement have reached unprecedented rates in the

past decade, hosting refugees has increasingly been met with public resis-

tance (Adida et al., 2018; Dancygier & Laitin, 2014). This trend is reflected

in the growing wave of scholarship on refugee reception in the Global North.

Yet the vast majority of refugees, more than 85%, are located in the Global

South, which makes understanding citizens’ attitudes toward refugees in

these regions both an important theoretical and policy question. We investi-

gate our research questions in sub-Saharan Africa, which hosts 6.3 million

Rosenzweig and Zhou 2125

Rosenzweig and Zhou 3

refugees, almost a third of the world’s refugee population (UNHCR, 2019).

To date, less scholarship has been devoted to understanding citizen attitudes

toward refugees in African contexts.1 Sub-Saharan Africa also presents an

interesting case where many countries are generally considered to have

weaker national ties and more robust ethnic affinities (e.g., Asiwaju, 1985;

Englebert, 2009; Herbst, 2000; Young, 2001).

Our study takes advantage of the 2019 Africa Cup football match between

East African rivals, Kenya and Tanzania. We recruited a panel of 2,647

respondents through Facebook in Kenya and Tanzania, and we measured

their pre and post-game levels of identification, pride, and attitudes toward

different groups. Using the outcome of the game—which Kenya narrowly

won—we use a difference-in-differences design to look at the effect of a win

on attitudes. In addition, experimental survey primes that manipulated either

the salience of a superordinate (pan-African) identity or highlighted the

diversity of the team allow us to test whether a national victory can be

reframed to foster inclusion and broaden the in-group to encompass other

African refugees.

Consistent with previous research, we first confirm that a national team

win bolsters national identity and pride in the nation. Next, we show that the

win does not affect attitudes toward refugees with respect to their contribu-

tion to the economy, disease, or crime in the country. However, we do find a

negative effect of winning on citizens’ attitudes about refugees’ contribution

to the diversity of the nation, and these effects last several days after the

match. Our results suggest that while national team victories do not affect

more practical concerns about refugees, they can heighten feelings of cultural

threat. Importantly, we also find that our primes, particularly that which

emphasizes a shared pan-African identity, help to ameliorate this negative

sentiment and actually induce positive attitudes toward refugee diversity as

well as greater willingness to allocate scarce government resources to refu-

gees in the country.

This paper contributes to the intergroup relations literature by examining

the connection between nationalism and xenophobia in sub-Saharan Africa

and provides an empirical test of the common in-group identity model

(Gaertner et al., 2000). Although our sample of social media users is not

nationally representative, we do not believe the effect of a sports team win

or survey primes are unique to our sample and may indeed generalize more

broadly, due to the psychological nature of the mechanism. Similarly, this

paper uses the context of a sports team victory as a “shock” to nationalism,

while recognizing that sporting events are an example of a class of salient

cultural events that can similarly evoke feelings of national pride and nation-

alism but may also induce animosity toward foreigners.2 We therefore