Preference and neglect amongst countries in the Eurovision Song Contest

Abstract

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has been a growing source of entertainment for millions of viewers. Countries arerepresented by a single song during a live performance and in an award ceremony scores are exchanged according to their preference. It has been speculated that socio-economic ties influence the awards. The work presented here aims at investigating a different explanation for the voting patterns which deviate significantly from a uniform distribution. A perspective which is not covered is whether an audience member sees bias as a route towards increasing a country’s score rank. Given that much of the biased voting is apparent to the audience, the question whether these biased connections present themselves as a path to increasing score rank is explored. The results show that countries which attracted more biased preferential edges (preference in degree) and produced bias towards other countries (preference out degree) had a significant rank correlation with their total accumulated score. This adds to the theory explaining the biased voting patterns, in that they assist towards the simple goal of an audience member seeking to win by utilizing exchange partnerships with those countries where socio-economic ties already exist.