Motivation

Retaliation (or the threat thereof) is a central component of human behavior. It plays a key role in sustaining cooperation — such as in international organizations or free trade agreements — because those known to retaliate come to acquire a reputation of being hard to exploit. But how does the use and function of retaliation vary across cultures, and how does it interact with formal forms of punishment?

In “Cross-cultural differences in retaliation: Evidence from the soccer field,” Alain Schläpfer tackles these questions using data on retaliation from association football. Retaliation is simply defined in terms of fouling: player B retaliates against player A if and only if, after A fouls B, B then fouls A. Among other findings, Schläpfer shows that players from cultures emphasizing revenge are more likely to retaliate on the football field. This form of ‘informal punishment’ by players also interacts with ‘formal punishment’ by referees: retaliation by B is less likely when A is sanctioned with a yellow card. Schläpfer’s paper increases our knowledge of the causes and consequences of retaliation, while showing how informal cultural norms interact with the formal rules of football.  

Data

Schläpfer creates a data set of fouls committed over three football seasons (2016-2019) in nine of the world’s top professional men’s leagues. This includes the European leagues of Premier League (England), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), LaLiga (Spain), and Ligue 1 (France), as well as Série A (Brazil), Liga Profesional (Argentina), Liga MX (Mexico), and Major League Soccer (United States). The dataset comprises 9,531 games, 230,113 fouls committed by 10,928 unique perpetrators from 139 countries against 11,115 unique victims from 137 countries.

Because Schläpfer hypothesizes that being from more revenge-centric cultures explains on-field retaliation, the key independent variable is measured using a dataset from Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue that identifies revenge motifs in a culture’s folklore. Examples of this include supernatural forces avenging human murders or animals avenging the death of their friends by humans. Schläpfer uses a host of other independent variables, such as country-level survey data about the desire to punish — as opposed to rehabilitate — criminals, which is also theoretically linked to revenge. As stated above, retaliation is measured in terms of fouls committed. Schläpfer shows that there is substantial variation in retaliation rates among players from different countries, from Gabon (8%) to Iceland (31%). Can the folklore in the country of origin explain the behavior of players on the field?
 

Image

Fig. 1. The share of fouls retaliated in soccer games (top) and the prevalence of revenge motifs in folklore (bottom). Both variables tend to have higher values for players and folklore from the Middle East, Central Africa, Eastern Europe, and parts of South America.
 

Findings

Retaliation:

Schläpfer finds evidence that players from cultures that value revenge are indeed more likely to retaliate for fouls. However, they are not more likely to commit fouls overall, cautioning us against conflating the concepts of retaliation and violence. Indeed, Schläpfer demonstrates that motifs of violence in a culture's folklore do not predict retaliation. Players are also found to be more retaliatory early on in a game, which is consistent with its use as a signal or aspect of one’s reputation. In other words, retaliation serves to deter future fouls. Victims of fouls also retaliate quickly. Indeed, retaliation rates are stable or slightly increasing during the first 30 minutes of a game, but then fall consistently thereafter.
 

Image

Evidence is also provided to show that retaliation deters future transgressions: perpetrators are less likely to foul again if victims retaliate for the initial foul. However, this deterrence finding is only observed when the perpetrator is from a revenge culture. In other words, for retaliation to support cooperation (the absence of fouls), players must share a similar cultural background.

Schläpfer’s findings hold even when soccer-related or socioeconomic factors are taken into account. Further, the paper considers, but finds little support for, alternative explanations of why retaliation varies. These include that some teams encourage players to retaliate more or employ more players from revenge cultures. Further, retaliation does not appear to be driven by emotions; otherwise, it would be less likely to occur after halftime when players have had a chance to cool down, but this is not the case.
 

Image

Informal and Formal Sanctioning:

Finally, Schläpfer analyzes the interaction between player retaliation and refereeing. Most importantly, retaliation is significantly less likely if a foul is sanctioned with a yellow card. This illustrates the theoretical principle of formal punishment “crowding out” informal punishment, such as religious excommunication, which carries greater weight than social shunning or police fines compared to peer pressure. Both retaliation and referee sanctioning are shown to reduce the frequency of repeated offenses by perpetrators, especially among players from revenge cultures. However, Schläpfer finds that formal sanctioning is roughly three times more effective than retaliation. This suggests that football referees are doing a better job managing conflict between players than players themselves. 

Schläpfer concludes by mentioning a few of the paper’s limitations. First of all, retaliation is measured only by what referees sanction. However, referees may miss crucial incidents for which retaliation is a response, such as Zinedine Zidane’s 2006 World Cup headbutt after a verbal insult (that was not sanctioned). This is important because individuals from revenge cultures are likely to be particularly offended by verbal insults. Second, the paper does not capture retaliation that occurs across games played by the same teams over time, particularly when rivalries and hostilities have intensified. Similarly, it does not account for preemptive retaliation that does not follow a foul. Ultimately, Schläpfer deepens our understanding of retaliation in a domain where many would expect it not to operate or to do so with minimal significance. The article impressively marshals large-scale data from both sports and cultural history to clarify the causes and consequences of retaliation.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering among the graduating senior class. Charles's thesis is entitled The Limits of Payout Politics: How Biden-Harris Federal Spending Shaped (and Didn't Shape) the 2024 Presidential Vote. His thesis examines whether the Biden-Harris administration’s signature spending programs — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act — yielded electoral rewards in the 2024 presidential election. Using an original dataset of over 40,000 geocoded federal projects representing $227 billion in county-level investments, Charles finds no statistically significant association between per-capita spending and shifts in Democratic vote margins, even when accounting for partisan context and project visibility. Through interviews with federal and local officials, he identifies three explanatory mechanisms: implementation lags prevented most projects from reaching completion before Election Day, administrative and policy bottlenecks systematically delayed development, and Republican messaging successfully reframed spending as inflationary. These findings suggest that retrospective voting operates primarily through immediate, visible benefits rather than campaign promises or announced investments, with significant implications for how policy initiatives must be designed to deliver outcomes within electoral cycles.

Adrian's thesis is entitled The Gavel and the Gun: Post-War Trials and State-Building Politics in Yugoslavia (1945-1949). His thesis explores how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) authorities used the post-World War II justice process to consolidate power from 1945 to 1949. Drawing on trial transcripts, newspapers, and other archival materials, the study argues that the Yugoslav state instrumentalized judicial structures in three distinct stages: first, using honor courts to assert basic state capacity; second, conducting public-facing war crimes trials to promote the state’s ideological legitimacy; and third, orchestrating espionage trials to suppress dissent and entrench single-party rule. While affirming that the KPJ often subordinated judicial integrity to its state-building project, the thesis complicates conventional narratives by attending to the moral ambiguities, partial truths, and undeniable moments of justice present in even the most politicized of trials. In doing so, it offers broader insights into the fraught intersection of law, memory, and power in postwar societies.

Adelaide's thesis is entitled Philoxenia: Local Responses to Immigration in Calabria, Italy. Over recent decades, many nations across Europe and the Americas have responded to mass migration movements across the globe with hostile policies, xenophobic sentiment, and poorly managed immigration systems. At the same time, several municipalities in Calabria, Italy that struggle with severe depopulation and economic hardship have experienced positive transformations upon opening refugee reception centers, including reversals to declining population trends, job creation and the continuation of important public goods, such as elementary schools — but not all towns that have a demand for immigration respond in the same way. Many Calabrian municipalities have not opened refugee resettlement centers, and others have become a breeding ground for labor exploitation among migrant workers. This thesis employs a mixed-methods approach to consider how structure, agency, and culture account for the variation in local responses to migrants and refugees throughout the relatively homogenous region of Calabria. A systematic analysis of quantitative municipal-level data paired with four granular case studies suggests that a municipality’s structural characteristics alone do not explain the variance in local responses to immigration. Rather, the presence of an entrepreneurial local actor, such as a mayor or non-profit leader with strong humanitarian commitments, is necessary to recognize and actualize the aligned interests between locals and newcomers and bring about cultures of hospitality. While much of the literature on local responses to immigration has focused on urban settings, this thesis aims to widen academic discussions to include more rural contexts and contributes to the underdeveloped literature on hospitality, rather than hostility, toward newcomers.

The Class of 2025

Charles, Adrian, and Adelaide are part of a cohort of 13 graduating CDDRL honors students who have spent the past year working in consultation with CDDRL-affiliated faculty members and attending honors research workshops to develop their thesis projects. The theses this year covered topics as wide ranging as authoritarian repression, conflict and state-building, regulation and governance, and democratic accountability. Students embarked on original research across multiple countries, conducting interviews, fielding surveys, plumbing archives, and building datasets.

“We are so proud of this year’s cohort of seniors in the Fisher Family Honors Program,” shared Didi Kuo, Center Fellow at FSI and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program. “Our multidisciplinary students brought a range of methods and analytical approaches to inform their understanding of democracy and development. They asked a range of trenchant research questions and brought a collaborative spirit to the research enterprise that improved everyone’s projects.”

In addition to the Firestone Medal and CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Awards, members of the Class of 2025 have received several other honors heading into graduation:

• Kate Tully is among four Stanford students named as 2025 Rhodes Scholars. The prestigious award provides support for talented scholars to pursue postgraduate degrees at Oxford University in England.
• Alex Borthwick, Adrian Feinberg, Malaina Kapoor, and Avinash Thakkar, along with junior Emma Wang, are among the newest members elected to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society.
• Adrian Feinberg was also named a Gaither Fellow. The national program offers recent graduates the opportunity to work as research assistants on projects related to democracy, global security, and foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.
• Alex Borthwick, Adrian Feinberg, Elizabeth Jerstad, and Gabriela Holzer have all received the Award of Excellence. Designed to recognize the top 10% of the class, this award honors graduating seniors who have demonstrated a sincere commitment to the university through involvement, leadership, and extraordinary Stanford spirit.

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. Honors students participate in research methods workshops, attend honors college in Washington, D.C., connect to the CDDRL research community, and write their thesis in close consultation with a faculty advisor to graduate with a certificate of honors in democracy, development, and the rule of law.
 

Explore the rest of the thesis topics of the Fisher Family Honors Program Class of 2025 below:

Former President George W. Bush met with Stanford students for an hourlong conversation that touched on many of the defining moments and policies of his presidency.

In a relaxed and sometimes self-deprecating exchange on May 5, Bush talked about the limits of congressional power and his relationships and personal diplomacy with other world leaders. His tone was more serious when discussing what he described as universal desires for freedom, his military strategies following 9/11, and his commitment to addressing Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, director of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, moderated the session. Stanford President John Hennessy and Condoleezza Rice – Bush’s secretary of state and national security adviser who has returned to teaching political science and business at Stanford – joined the conversation.

"FSI has a terrific track record of convening leaders at Stanford, from the head of the International Monetary Fund to prime ministers and presidents,” Cuéllar said. “On this occasion, we wanted our students to have an opportunity for a candid conversation with one of the key policymakers of the early 21^st century, and we think such experiences will further prepare them for leadership in a complex world."

About 30 students were invited to the session at Encina Hall, but they didn’t know they were meeting Bush until the 43^rd president walked into the room.

“I suspect he misses this sort of engagement,” said Gregory Schweizer, a second-year law school student who was part of the discussion that also covered immigration reform, national education policies and the Edward Snowden affair.

“The media always portrays him as being disengaged from current affairs,” Schweizer said. “But I’m impressed with how interested and engaged he still is.”

Along with representatives from Stanford Law School, other students were invited from the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Honors students from FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law also joined the conversation.

Bush’s visit was arranged with the help of  Brad Freeman, a former university trustee and Ronald Spogli, who is currently on Stanford's board of trustees. Freeman and Spogli are longtime friends of the former president and philanthropists who donated a naming gift to FSI in 2005. Bush appointed Spogli as ambassador to Italy in 2005 and as ambassador to San Marino a year later. 

Stanford has a tradition of hosting current and former heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – both of whom visited in 2010.