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 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.

A Linked Data Model for Data Scopes

“…It can be further specified towards concrete cases. For example, the research by Mantzaris et al [ 9 ] uses multiple classification schemes because of changes in vote distribution for Eurovision throughout the years. This complexity does not fit our model yet but classes for this could be added.…”

Extracting the signed backbone of intrinsically dense weighted networks

“…Each country, via public votes 5 , awards the set of points {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,12} to 10 other countries. Studies employing a network analysis perspective [28,16,32,56,57,26,75] show that voting behavior is not determined only by the music/performance quality but affected by political factors, geographical and cultural similarity, diasporas, and others. Contact network data [43] is gathered via wearable sensors at an academic conference 6 with 113 attendees over 2.5 days.…”

Does music quality matter for audience voters in a music contest?

“…Empirical economic studies have analyzed different music contests in order to identify factors determining the outcome. Many studies have focused on the Eurovision Song Contest (inter alia Yair 1995; Haan et al 2005;Clerides & Stengos 2006, Fenn et al 2006Ginsburgh & Noury 2008;Spierdijk & Vellekoop 2009;Kokko & Tingvall 2012;Budzinski & Pannicke 2017a, 2017cMantzaris et al 2018aMantzaris et al , 2018b but also the Queen Elizabeth Music Contest (Flôres & Ginsburgh 1996;Glejser & Heyndels 2001;Ginsburgh & van Ours 2003) and so-called casting shows like Pop Idol or X-earlier studies of the Bundesvision Song Contest (Pannicke 2016(Pannicke , 2018Budzinski & Pannicke 2017a, 2017b), which will be put into focus in this paper as well. A related branch of literature has studied success factors in music charts (inter alia, Hamlen 1991(inter alia, Hamlen , 1994Crain & Tollison 2002;Giles 2006Giles , 2007aGiles , 2007bAsai 2008;Filimon et al 2011;Fereira & Waldfogel 2013), of rock concert revenues (Krueger 2005) as well as of online streaming, views and subscriptions with respect to various platforms (Bauer & Schedl 2018;.…”