Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football
研究非洲国家足球队胜利对民族认同和冲突的影响，发现胜利后个体更少以族群自居、更信任其他族群，且国家晋级非洲杯可减少9%的国内冲突。
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.