Abstract
The equestrian sport dressage is the only Olympic sport with subjective performance evaluations in which male and female athletes compete as equals, and international dressage competitions include judges and athletes of both genders and of many nationalities. Thus, these competitions provide a rare opportunity to explore gender bias and nationalistic bias in the same setting, using naturally occurring data on repeated high-stakes decisions of professional decision makers. In this paper, I use a unique data set of 89,124 scores from top-level dressage competitions between 2007 and 2012. For each performance by an individual athlete, the data include the 2 scores given by each of the five judges on the panel, allowing for clean identification of in-group biases. Overall, I find robust evidence of nationalistic bias but no gender bias. Further analyses suggest that nationalistic bias may crowd out gender bias in international contexts. Moreover, the nationalistic bias is largest in championships and team competitions, indicating that nationalistic bias is positively correlated with the salience of national identity. Finally, I find that judges are influenced by the nationality of the other members of the judging panel. Judges give higher scores to athletes who are of the same nationality as one of the other judges on the panel, thus reinforcing each other’s nationalistic biases. Consequently, having at least one judge from the same country as oneself can have a large impact on an athlete’s final score, as the scores from all judges on the judging panel are affected. This might indicate that judges engage in vote trading.