The World Cup Crackdown

Autocracies host a growing share of the world's biggest sports events. Does hosting a mega-event make a regime behave better, or simply hide what it does? The paper tests this on Argentina's military junta and the 1978 World Cup: repression should spike in host cities before the tournament and drop while the world is watching.

I modelled daily repression across 58,383 department-day observations with three nested OLS specifications (adding socio-economic controls and military-zone fixed effects) and HC1 robust standard errors. Robustness checks used logit and linear probability models on a binary outcome, plus a matched sample of host and non-host departments.

The rise-then-fall in host cities is significant at the 1% level in every specification and doesn't move when controls are added. I replicated the summary tables, four figures and three regression tables, and added a check of the predictions against observed repression.