A study on the impact of crowd-based voting schemes in the 'Eurovision' European contest

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: ABSTRACTThe Eurovision contest has been the reference on european song contests for the past 50 years. Countries in the European Union can shows the rest of the participants their current music tendencies. This phenomena has been studied in domains like physic and social sciences to find correlations between contests and current political and socio-economy trends in EU. The inclusion of web and social technologies some years ago, have caused a disruption in the traditional voting system whereby the audience is encouraged to participate by casting votes for their favorite song. As a result, this system yields new, relevant information that may be extrapolated to social and political tendencies in Europe with a higher degree accuracy than by data collected using the previous jury-based system. This paper provides an initial data analysis in crowd behavior to assess the impact of the televote system, in the Eurovision voting dynamic, by focusing on two distinct five years periods that can successfully contrast each voting scheme. Analyzing these periods separately, we can observe results from the televoting contests and then compare to the jury to see if there is a change in voting patterns. Finally, we study the underlying community structure of the voting network using the Cluster Percolation Method and Edge Betweenness to discover stable core communities spanning a number of years in the contest. The clusters obtained using these algorithms are then used to compare how these stable communities have evolving during the considered periods.

Measuring Cultural Dynamics Through the Eurovision Song Contest

“…Since 2009, these televotes were combined with some expert judges, turning Eurovision in an experimental ground to compare popular and expert choices. Recent studies show the statistical changes due to televoting [39], while older works measure how expert judges chose their votes according to song quality rather than cultural biases [27]. Either way, the results of this contest highlight the stable cultural relations between countries [43], where voting trades or game theoretical decisions do not seem to play a role [24].…”

“…Every year, each participating country chooses a representative artist to compete by performing a song, which is included in a live event broadcasted simultaneously in the whole Europe. After the performance of each participant, voting countries gather televotes and jury votes [39], creating a local ranking of songs from other contestants. Afterwards, each voting country publicly announces which other countries receive points from 1 to 8, 10, and 12, according to their local rankings.…”

“…Initial research focused on the possible existence of voting clusters or alliances [45,46], generally due to geographical locations, diaspora effects, language, and religious similarities [43]. Further studies combined network analysis with simulations of maximally random contests, revealing how Eurovision results have high clustering [15], which results in voting blocks [22,39], and higher chances to win for countries depending on their position in the voting network [13,42].…”

“…Our approach does not aim to predict contest outcomes or to reveal voting alliances, but to use Eurovision as a social macroscope for the relations across European countries. Initial results show how Eurovision outcomes can predict international trade [14,32], which motivates the measuring of the cohesion of European countries and the EU through Eurovision [39]. Popular culture and mass media criticize the contest organization, claiming that some countries are treated as European only in Eurovision 4 , as a limitation for a "Europeaniziation process" [29].…”

Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest

“…Similar to bloc voting, Eurovision voters seem to have a strong tendency to vote for neighbouring countries (Dekker, 2007; Orgaz et al, 2011; Spierdijk and Vellekoop, 2009). For example, Fenn et al (2006) find that Cyprus and Greece have almost always exchanged votes; that is, they have reciprocally given each other the most votes.…”