The Politics of Eurovision: A Case Study of the United Kingdom’s 2021 and 2022 Participations as Expressed on Social Media

María García-Gámez; Antonio Moreno-Ortiz

doi:10.4995/rlyla.2024.19366

Authors

María García-Gámez Universidad de Málaga https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7068-0038
Antonio Moreno-Ortiz Universidad de Málaga https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8268-9598

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2024.19366

Keywords:

Eurovision, Twitter, social media, politics, sentiment analysis, discourse analysis

Abstract

In recent years, the opinion that the Eurovision Song Contest has become highly politicised is prevalent in the media and the popular voice, although not much research exists that can attest to this claim. In this work we conduct a case study that applies sentiment and discourse analysis methodologies to the assessment of political opinions in social media regarding this artistic and social event. The main objective is to explore to what extent and in what form this supposed politicisation has an expression on Twitter, as illustrated by the cases of artists Sam Ryder and James Newman, the United Kingdom’s representatives in the 2022 and 2021 editions of the contest, respectively. We examine references to two historical-political contexts that have had a severe impact on the European society over the last few years, and which have determined, among many other social aspects, the reception of Eurovision results ever since they took place: Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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Author Biographies

María García-Gámez, Universidad de Málaga

María García-Gámez is a research assistant at the University of Málaga, where she is currently

working on her PhD thesis as a fully funded candidate. She holds a BA degree in English Studies and

an MA in English Studies and Multilingual and Intercultural Communication. Her research interests

involve corpus linguistics, sentiment analysis and social media.

Antonio Moreno-Ortiz, Universidad de Málaga

Antonio Moreno-Ortiz is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the University of Málaga, where he

has worked for more than 20 years. His research interests include computational linguistics, corpus

linguistics and language technologies, which has led him to develop multiple linguistic resources for

natural language processing, such as BNC Indexer, OntoTerm, Sentitext and Lingmotif.

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