'Does culture explain voting biases in association football awards?': The FIFA Ballon d'Or 2013 award.

This bachelor thesis assesses whether voting biases can be explained by cultural similarities in the FIFA Ballon d’Or 2013 award. The data for this award is publicly available and the award has been publicly accused of being biased. After analyzing previous literature we find that a nationality bias seems to exist in the judging of certain Olympic sports, while a cultural bias seems to exist in the Eurovision Song Contest. We calculate voting biases and use Hofstede’s culture indexes to calculate cultural diversity between voter and player. We then perform a correlation and multiple regression analysis to find whether cultural similarity significantly affects voting bias. No evidence is found that cultural diversity significantly effects voting bias. However, we find evidence that a nationality bias exist in the FIFA Ballon d’Or 2013 award. The results also imply that cultural voting bias only exists when voters can’t vote for people from the same nationality.