Creating Europe through culture? The impact of the European Song Contest on European identity

The UK’s Brexit vote marked a major institutional crisis for the EU and re-opened both the scholarly and the popular debate about the importance and drivers of a “European identity”. We use quasi-experimental data to estimate the immediate impact of the biggest pan-European cultural event, the Eurov...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Empirica 2020-11, Vol.47 (4), p.885-908
Main Authors: Coupe, Tom, Chaban, Natalia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citizens
Contests
Cultural relations
Econometrics
Economics
Economics and Finance
EU membership
European Integration
Identity
Industrial Organization
International Economics
Macroeconomics/Monetary Economics//Financial Economics
Original Paper
Public Finance
Quasi-experimental methods
Singing
Voting
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Summary:The UK’s Brexit vote marked a major institutional crisis for the EU and re-opened both the scholarly and the popular debate about the importance and drivers of a “European identity”. We use quasi-experimental data to estimate the immediate impact of the biggest pan-European cultural event, the Eurovision Song Contest, on whether people in Europe consider themselves to be Europeans. Using data from several Eurobarometer surveys with tens of thousands of observations, we find little evidence that the contest at current provides a sizeable immediate boost to the share of Europeans who feel European, feel EU citizens, or have a positive image of the EU.
ISSN:0340-8744
1573-6911
DOI:10.1007/s10663-019-09461-6