Nationalistic bias in sport performance evaluations : an example from the ski jumping World Cup

Abstract

Illegitimate biases of non-independent judges represent a threat to the legitimacy of international sport competitions. Judges' nationalities represent one source of bias, as they consciously or subconsciously may prefer athletes from their own nation. Such biases may affect the outcomes of competitions. The literature offers no complete consensus on the magnitude, origin and stability of such biases. In this paper, we shed light on these problems, using international ski jumping as an example. We draw on data from the FIS World Cup competitions in the 2006-2008 and 2015-2016 seasons and estimate a series of fixed-effects models to test hypotheses on nationalistic biases. Our results reaffirm suspicions of nationalistic bias in major ski jumping competitions, but also show their magnitude is too little to be of major relevance to competition outcomes. The biases vary between nations, but do not change markedly over the study period.