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.

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 socioeconomic 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 socioeconomic ties already exist.

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