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 the debate, both in the scholarly literature and the media, about the importance and the drivers of a “European identity” for the EU’s citizens. We use quasi-experimental data to estimate the 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 years of Eurobarometer surveys with tens of thousands of observations, we find little evidence that the contest provides a sizeable boost to the share of Europeans who feel European, feel EU citizens, or have a positive image of the EU.