Abstract des Autors

Much research has been done in earlier literature to analyze socioeconomic determinants of Olympic sporting success at the national level. We show that conventional determinants like population size and economic ressources have only a limited explanatory power for medal counts since 1970 in case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We argue that the reason why medal counts are decoupled from conventional socioeconomic determinants is that the socialist dictatorship undertook massive investments in doping in elite sports to stabilize and promote citizens' loyality in the wake of an accelerating economic depression. A simple model of an optimizing dictatorship shows that a rational dictatorship increases investments in elite sports and doping in a way that the marginal utility from such investments equals the marginal utility from spending economic ressources on political repression. Empirical results are in line with the predictions of our model. Verf.-Referat