United We Feel Stronger? On the Olympics and Political Ideology

Collective ideologies are a feature of the Olympic Games as individual athletes represent entire nations. Prior research has explored one dimension of Olympic ideology, finding a link between national pride and hosting the Olympics. This paper extends the literature by considering a wider variety of ideological indicators, such as confidence in several different components of government and beliefs about different political systems. The results using a series of global surveys across several decades suggest that success at the Olympics and hosting of the Olympics does not guarantee greater citizen support or government legitimacy. Performance in the Summer or Winter Olympics has no consistent effect on the ideological views of survey respondents. In terms of hosting, the effect on ideology varies across the Summer and Winter Olympics. Hosting the Summer Olympics weakens citizen support and government legitimacy while hosting the Winter Olympics strengthens these ideologies. These effects vary based upon the level of democratic quality of the host nations for the Summer Olympics but not for the Winter Olympics.