What Political Science Teaches Us About the World Cup and World Peace
I've been following with glee the US Women's National Soccer Team's run in this year's World Cup. At time of recording, the United States was set to face either Netherlands or Sweden in the finals.
It turns out that political science has something to say about whether or not international sporting events like this contributes to peace and security--or not.
Last year, I interviewed the author of a peer reviewed study that found a rather significant correlation between success in the mens world cup and an outbreak in conflict. The political scientist Andrew Bertoli created a data set of every world cup from 1958 to 2010 and found that countries that qualified for the World Cup were significantly more likely to start an international conflict than countries that did not quality.
Andrew Bertoli is a professor at IE University in Spain. When we recorded this interview, right before the 2018 Winter Olympics, he was a post-doc fellow at Dartmouth.
The study we discuss was titled Nationalism and Conflict: Lessons from International Sports appears in the December 2017 issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.