Examining Collusion and Voting Biases Between Countries During the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1957

Abstract

Abstract:The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will be awarded a set of scores from other participating countries based upon a quality assessment of a performance. There is a question of whether the countries will vote exclusively according to the artistic merit of the song, or if the vote will be a public signal of national support for another country. Since the competition aims to bring people together, any consistent biases in the awarding of scores would defeat the purpose of the celebration of expression and this has attracted researchers to investigate the supporting evidence for biases. This paper builds upon an approach which produces a set of random samples from an unbiased distribution of score allocation, and extends the methodology to use the full set of years of the competition's life span which has seen fundamental changes to the voting schemes adopted. By building up networks from statistically significant edge sets of vote allocations during a set of years, the results display a plausible network for the origins of the culture anchors for the preferences of the awarded votes. With years of data, the results support the hypothesis of regional collusion and biases arising from proximity, culture and other irrelevant factors in regards to the music which that alone is intended to a ect the judgment of the contest.

Preference and neglect amongst countries in the Eurovision Song Contest

“…What is noteworthy is that many of the significant edges of bias uncovered in [19,20] such as Greece↔Cyprus and between the Nordic countries did not come as a surprise. Even without the computational support many consistencies of large accumulated score exchanges between certain countries can be inferred easily if significant and consistent enough.…”

“…With all the merits of these different models proposed, there is a need to provide a greater emphasis on filtering out false positives. The approaches presented in [19,20] provide a flexible framework for analyzing the scores using an unbiased score generator under a null model from which scores are sampled over a period of consecutive years (time window). By designing a null model under explicit assumptions, samples of score assignments which would be expected void of the sociopolitical phenomena are produced so that deviations from this distribution, for whatever reason, can be considered as significant or not.…”

“…Focusing on the significantly large score deviations, the work of [19] looks at collusive edges (bi-directional preference) within specified time windows. Other studies such as [13,21], focuses on the one-way edges (directed preference), and [20] on aggregate networks from both types of edges over consecutive time windows. In [22], the two types are examined to see if the one-way or two-way biases provide a functionality similar to a cultural bridge between clusters of countries with edges between themselves.…”

“…Most approaches utilize data from 1975 onwards and fix the time windows for when the voting scheme is homogeneous. The work of [20], presents a methodology with a sampling scheme for a null model of unbiased score allocations allowing for cases where the voting scheme is heterogeneous. Utilizing this methodological framework gives the freedom to choose a time period of analysis of the ESC scores since 1957 onwards over any consecutive set of years.…”

“…Using the methodology adapted from [20], described in Section 3, the significant aforementioned edge types are uncovered. Assessing the perceived benefit of producing bias could previously be done for the whole competition by including only the large score deviations while ignoring the significant lower allocations.…”