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NATIONAL CULTURES AND SOCCER VIOLENCE

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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIESNATIONAL CULTURES AND SOCCER VIOLENCEEdward MiguelSebastián M. SaieghShanker SatyanathWorking Paper 13968http://www.nber.org/papers/w13968NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH1050 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02138March 2008Corresponding author: Edward Miguel, 508-1 Evans Hall #3880, University of California, BerkeleyCA 94720-3880. We are grateful to Dan Altman, Ray Fisman, Matias Iaryczower, David Laitin, DaniRodrik, and a host of anonymous bloggers for useful comments, and Dan Hartley, Teferi Mergo, andMelanie Wasserman for excellent research assistance. All errors remain our own. The views expressedherein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau ofEconomic Research.© 2008 by Edward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath. All rights reserved. Shortsections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission providedthat full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.National Cultures and Soccer ViolenceEdward Miguel, Sebastián M. Saiegh, and Shanker SatyanathNBER Working Paper No. 13968March 2008JEL No. K0,O57,Z1ABSTRACTCan some acts of violence be explained by a society's "culture"? Scholars have found it hard to empiricallydisentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address thisproblem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer(football) players in the European professional leagues. We find a strong relationship between thehistory of civil conflict in a player's home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccerfield, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics(e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality), outliers,and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate cultures of violence rather than simplerule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between a player's homecountry civil war history and soccer performance measures not closely related to violent conduct.Edward MiguelDepartment of Economics508-1 Evans Hall #3880Berkeley, CA 94705-3880and [email protected]án M. SaieghDepartment of Political Science, Social Sciences B9500 Gilman DriveLa Jolla, CA [email protected] SatyanathNYU Department of Politics19 W. 4th StreetNew York, NY [email protected]. Introduction Researchers increasingly acknowledge the adverse effects of violence on economic development, but the causes of violence remain imperfectly understood (Heinemann and Verner 2006, Murdoch and Sandler 2004, World Bank 2003). Our understanding of the role of social and cultural norms in driving violence is especially limited, due to inherent empirical challenges. Conventional efforts to control for non-cultural factors in a regression framework are complicated by the fact that both formal legal and informal cultural restraints on violent conduct reinforce each other and are thus plausibly correlated across societies (for an example see Waldmann 2007: 63). Inferences about national culture drawn from cross-country comparisons of the incidence of violent acts, such as violent crime rates, are also unsatisfying because laws and income levels (two plausible alternative explanations) differ across societies and may interact with culture in complicated ways (Becker 1968). Moreover, limited cross-national coverage of crime data (especially for less developed countries), and differences in crime reporting standards, make it difficult to draw clear inferences about the presence of violent national cultures using available crime statistics. This short paper implements a novel research strategy to establish the empirical importance of cultures of violence. We study violence on the soccer (football) field in the European soccer leagues, a cosmopolitan environment where thousands of individuals from numerous countries regularly choose whether or not to use violence to achieve their aims. The European soccer leagues offer a natural experiment for our purposes because they constitute a setting where individuals from different countries make these decisions in a common legal institutional setting, and where we can also effectively control for alternative explanations for violence. Our focus is on the relationship between a country’s history of civil war and violence on the soccer pitch. The strong link between war and norms of violent conduct described by sociologists (see below), combined with reliable civil war data across a wide cross-section of countries, allow us to rigorously explore this relationship.2Our main empirical measures of individual violent conduct are the number of yellow and red cards earned. According to soccer’s official rules, players who commit exceptionally violent fouls warrant a disciplinary sanction in the form of a caution (indicated by a yellow card) or a dismissal from the match (indicated by a red card). Using data from six of the world’s major soccer leagues (all in Europe), containing players from all continents and seventy countries, we obtain a striking empirical pattern: a strong correlation between the history of civil war in a player’s native country and his likelihood of earning yellow and red cards. Confirming that civil war history captures an aspect of culture related to violent acts, rather than general rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful relationship between home country conflict and other soccer performance measures that are not closely related to violent conduct. This main result is robust to extensive controls for player characteristics, country income levels and continent fixed effects, where we effectively compare nearby countries (for example, African countries with different civil war histories). Beyond providing a novel real-world measure of individuals’ willingness to commit acts of violence, this finding indicates that some aspects of national culture are persistent even when individuals are far from home in a different institutional setting, here, a professional sports league. Below, we discuss other robustness checks and the issue of player selection into our sample. Other studies have used the sports playing field as a laboratory for studying individual decision-making under a clear set of


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