Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T18:32:33.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Cold War on Ice: Constructivism and the Politics of Olympic Figure Skating Judging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2007

Brian R. Sala ,
John T. Scott  and
James F. Spriggs
Brian R. Sala
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis, e-mail [email protected]
John T. Scott
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis, e-mail [email protected]
James F. Spriggs
Affiliation:
Washington University at Saint Louis, e-mail [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We examine judge bias in Olympic figure skating as an exploratory analysis of a leading constructivist approach to identity using quantitative methods more closely associated with non-constructivist social science. While constructivism is a major theoretical orientation in international relations, large-n quantitative studies of the approach are uncommon in large measure due to the principal argument of constructivists: that interests should be treated endogenously. If interests and identities are mutually constituted, then it would seem to be impossible to distinguish their effects, creating a problem of observational equivalence. Some constructivist theorists nevertheless suggest that under certain conditions material interests can be thought of as causes of collective identity, meaning that it is in principle possible to isolate the influence of identity. We build on this “bounded” version of constructivism by identifying an arena of international relations in which the observable effect of the identities constituted by interactions among states can be analyzed independent of those states' national security concerns. We study whether collective identities constituted by the international system during the Cold War systematically influenced judge bias in Olympic figure skating, examining whether judges' evaluations of skaters systematically vary according to whether their respective states viewed one another as “friends,” “rivals,” or “enemies.”Brian R. Sala is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis ([email protected]). John T. Scott is professor in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis ([email protected]). James F. Spriggs II is Professor of Political Science at Washington University at Saint Louis ([email protected]). Previous versions of this paper were given in the Department of Political Science at University of California, Davis, and at the 2004 Western Political Science Association meeting, for which we owe thanks to Kris Kanthak.We would like to thank the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Karen Cover at the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame and Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado for providing the data for this study. We would also like to acknowledge the generous research funding provided by the University of California, Davis, and the tireless work Dan Brunstetter did in entering the data and consulting his mother on the finer points of figure skating. A number of friends and colleagues offered valuable advice: Dan Brunstetter, James Fowler, Scott Gartner, Bob Huckfeldt, Cindy Kam, Yuch Kono, Zeev Maoz, Jennifer Ramos, Randy Siverson, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Walt Stone, Mike Thies, and Chris Zorn. Finally, for his immense statistical expertise and especially for inspiring us to publish this paper we owe special thanks to Jeff Gill.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 17 - 29
Copyright
© 2007 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Blalock, Hubert. 1979. Social Statistics. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Brennan, Christine. 1996. The Inside Edge: A Revealing Journey into the Secret World of Figure Skating. New York: Scribner.
Brennan, Christine. 1998. Edge of Glory: The Inside Story of the Quest for Figure Skating's Olympic Gold Medals. New York: Scribner.
Bring, Johan, and Kenneth Carling. 1994. A paradox in the ranking of figure skaters, Chance 7 (Fall): 34–7.Google Scholar
Campbell, Bryan, and John W. Galbraith. 1996. Nonparametric tests of the unbiasedness of Olympic figure-skating judgments, The Statistician 45 (4): 521–26.Google Scholar
Copeland, Dale C. 2000. The constructivist challenge to structural realism. International Security 25 (2): 187–212.Google Scholar
Duggan, Mark, and Steven D. Levitt. 2002. Winning isn't everything: Corruption in sumo wrestling. American Economic Review 92 (5): 1594–605.Google Scholar
Espy, Richard. 1979. The Politics of the Olympic Games. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fenwick, Ian, and Shagit Chatterjee. 1981. Perception, preference, and patriotism: An exploratory analysis of the 1980 Winter Olympics. American Statistician 35 (3): 170–73.Google Scholar
Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 2001. Taking stock: The constructivist research program in international relations and comparative politics. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 391–416.Google Scholar
Gill, Jeff. 1999. The insignificance of null hypothesis significance testing. Political Research Quarterly 52 (3): 647–74.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Joy. 2004. The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Hopf, Ted. 1998. The promise of constructivism in international relations theory. International Security 23 (1): 171–200.Google Scholar
Houlihan, Barrie. 1994. Sport and International Politics. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Jepperson, Ronald L., Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein. 1996. Norms, identity, and culture in national security.” In The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein. New York: Columbia University Press.
Julnes, George, and Lawrence Mohr. 1989. Analysis of no-difference findings in evaluation research. Evaluation Review 13 (6): 628–55.Google Scholar
Katzenstein, Peter J. 1996. Introduction: Alternative perspectives on national security. In The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kestnbaum, Ellyn. 2003. Culture on Ice: Figure Skating and Cultural Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Meernik, James, Eric L. Krueger, and Steven C. Poe. 1998. Testing models of U.S. foreign policy: Foreign aid during and after the Cold War. Journal of Politics 60 (1): 63–85.Google Scholar
Mohr, Lawrence. 1990. Understanding Significance Testing. New York: Sage Publications.
Nincic, Miroslav. 1988. United States Foreign Policy: Choices and Tradeoffs. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.
Riordan, James. 1991. Sport, Politics and Communism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Senn, Alfred Erich. 1999. Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games. Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics.
Sterling-Folker, Jennifer. 2002. Realism and the constructivist challenge: Rejecting, reconstructing, or rereading. International Studies Review 4 (1): 73–97.Google Scholar
Strenk, Andrew. 1979. What price victory? The world of international sports and politics. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 445 (September): 128–40.Google Scholar
Voeten, Erik. 2000. Clashes in the Assembly. International Organization 54 (2): 185–215.Google Scholar
Weekley, Jeff A., and Joseph A. Gier. 1989. Ceilings in the reliability and validity of performance ratings: The case of expert raters. Academy of Management Journal 32 (1): 213–22.Google Scholar
Wendt, Alexander. 1992. Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization 46: 395–421.Google Scholar
Wendt, Alexander. 1994. Collective identity formation and the international state. American Political Science Review 88 (2): 384–96.Google Scholar
Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whissell, R., S. Lyons, D. Wilkinson, and C. Whissell. 1993. National bias in judgments of Olympic-level skating. Perceptual and Measurement Skills 77: 355–58.Google Scholar
White, Halbert. 1980. A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity. Econometrica 48 (May): 817–38.Google Scholar
Zorn, Christopher, and Jefferson Gill. 2004. “The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule.” Paper presented at the 2004 Western Political Science Association meetings, Chicago, April 7–10.