Did the EU debt crisis affect the Eurovision Song Contest voting?
As the economies of countries such as Greece and Portugal flirted with disaster in 2010–11, voting patterns in the competition changed significantly, becoming more polarized. The nations most affected apparently began to favour other ones in crisis, as if to show solidarity, and ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ became more pronounced overall. The researchers report these results in a study posted on the preprint server arXiv1. Or, after a long absence, Italy re-entered the Contest with a cracking song that distorted all the voting patterns… then it settled down the year after?
