Winning the Bid, Losing the City: Institutional Design and the Collapse of Olympic Bidding in Democracies

Abstract

This paper examines how institutional design features of Olympic bidding undermine the political feasibility of hosting in democratic cities. It argues that bids fail when decision-making authority is concentrated among a narrow set of political and economic actors, while financial risk is broadly distributed to taxpayers. Under these conditions, public support is inherently unstable: as information about fiscal exposure and governance opacity becomes salient, opposition mobilizes, and political support erodes. To test this argument, this study employs a mixed-methods research design combining time-series analysis of public opinion data with a qualitative case study of the Boston 2024 Olympic bid. The findings show that declining support is strongly associated with shifts in perceived financial risk and limited democratic control, indicating that support for hosting is conditional rather than intrinsic. These results challenge existing explanations that focus primarily on cost overruns after hosting and instead demonstrate that institutional design determines whether bids remain politically viable in the first place. They further show that the IOC’s Agenda 2020 reforms failed to address the underlying incentive structure of Olympic bidding, reducing procedural costs without correcting the risk asymmetry between the IOC and host governments. Without redistributing financial risk or strengthening democratic accountability, Olympic bids in democratic cities are likely to continue to collapse.