Culturally-Biased Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: Do National Contests Differ?

Abstract

JEL-Codes: L82, Z10

Geographies of tacit knowledge transfer: Evidence from the European co-authorship network

“…Country membership in regional bodies usually originates in shared historical legacies, geographical proximities, and linguistic and cultural affinities. Such affinities manifest in many, often unexpected, patterns of cooperation, such as 'voting alliances' in the Eurovision Song Contest (Budzinski and Pannicke, 2017). Do 'friend or foe' alliances (García and Tanase, 2013) manifest only in emotionladen song contests, or are they present in (supposedly rational) choices of research partners as well?…”

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

“…The work of [15] is an example where measures can be applied to quantify 'self-focus' and 'regional focus' in the context of cultural understanding to estimate the affinity, which can be combined with our conclusions. It would then be of interest to add further comparisons with more subtle regional differences from competitions of national levels, as studied in [6], which would reinforce the concept of self-similarity being ubiquitous in all complex networks [18].…”

“…scheme of allocation applies. The score allocation is then defined according to [10]; where each voting country A allocates a set of points (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,12) to the ten other countries which are a subset of the entire set of S countries' minus one due to the fact that a country cannot vote for itself. By reversing the order of this score set, the position variable sampled in the above algorithm in line 9 is used to produce the voting scheme in Table 3.…”

“…Since these behaviors have geographic and cultural overlaps it has led researchers to investigate this for the complete set of participants. Various computational modeling techniques have been used to answer whether there are political or cultural motives affecting the voting process, [13,6]. The work here helps answer questions such as these by providing a larger set of years to cross compare for stable and evolving relationships between different countries over a greater period of time and handling the changes to the award system.…”

“…In adopting a statistical methodology to produce the statistically significant set of biases from the data we look to ensure that the assumptions respect the data generating process which is not homogeneous in this case. Given the work of those already cited and including that of [6,13,17,5,2] we see an active area of research which is likely to continue as the countries and contest evolves. A full literature review is not intended here, but the scope is to establish a new methodology which addresses the necessary question of how to fuse the timeline of voting histories produced from different voting schemes into a single consistent methodology that can provide answers of which participating countries displayed significant voting bias along any chosen set of years.…”