The structure of bias in peer voting systems: lessons from the Eurovision Song Contest

Abstract

This paper assesses whether and how common characteristics of jury members or peer voters affect the outcomes of voting systems. In particular, we analyze to what extent these common features result in voting bias. We take as a case study the Eurovision Song Contest for which an extensive amount of historical data is available. In contrast to earlier studies we analyze the impact of common factors on the bias individually for each country, which is necessary to substantiate the publicly debated accusations of regional block voting by certain groups of countries. We establish strong evidence for voting bias in the song contest on the basis of geography, even after correction for culture, language, religion and ethnicity. However, these effects do generally not correspond to the usual accusations. We believe that our findings extend to all instances where groups of jury members or peer voters share certain common factors, which may cause voting bias. It is important to identify such structures explicitly, as it can help avoiding bias in the first place.The authors are grateful to Marieke van Dijk for excellent research assistance and to Laurens Swinkels, Ieva Pudane, Gijsbert van Lomwel, Jelena Stefanovic, and Bas van den Heuvel for useful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. L. Spierdijk (B)

Impartiality, friendship-networks and voting behavior: Evidence from voting patterns in the Eurovision Song Contest

“…Since many past studies have been interesting in this concept, measuring 'bias' is commonplace in the literature on Eurovision voting (see Ginsburgh and Noury, 2008;Spierdijk and Vellekoop, 2009 for example). Bias from country C i to C j is of course not simply awarding a high number of points, because C j 's song could have also receive high points from a large proportion of other countries, implying that the quality of C j 's song is high in the minds of the general voting public.…”

“…They find that along with certain song traits (English, female soloist and host country), that the total level of trade between two countries is a significant factor in ESC voting, even when accounting for contiguity, language and common religion. Spierdijk and Vellekoop (2009) use a fixed effects analysis with data from 1975 to 2003 and shift the dependent variable from 'voting' or 'ranking' to 'bias' from one country to another. They find that even when controlling for culture and language, that geography plays a key role in explaining positive bias from one country to another -countries favor their neighbors suggesting that geographic political bloc voting is strong.…”

Evidence of bias in the Eurovision song contest: modelling the votes using Bayesian hierarchical models

“…Fenn et al [5] used dynamical network and cluster models to show that while the existence of 'unofficial cliques' of countries is supported by the empirical evidence, the underlying mechanism for this cannot be fully explained by geographical proximity. Spierdijk and Vellekoop [13] investigated how geographical, cultural, linguistic, and religious factors lead to voting bias using multilevel models and considering the bias of one country towards another as the dependent variable. Their analysis points to evidence to suggest that geographical and social factors influence certain countries voting behaviour, although political factors did not seem to play a role in influencing voting.…”

Do preferences for pop music converge across countries? – Empirical evidence from the Eurovision Song Contest

“…These papers establish empirical evidence for (culturally) biased voting behaviors, which are based on geographical closeness, political relations, and linguistic, religious, and ethnical factors. These variables are allegedly caused by the audience and jury influence in the voting process with the most recent and most elaborate publications being by Fenn et al (2006), Ginsburgh and Noury (2008), Spierdijk and Vellekoop (2009) as well as Budzinski and Pannicke (2016). 7 However, to our best knowledge, none of the papers has dealt with concentration trends.…”

“…During the years, the voting system and the weight of the votes between those two groups has changed. In the literature on ESC voting behavior, there is indication that juries and the audience differ in their voting behavior with respect to voting biases (inter alia, Haan et al 2005;Clerides and Stengos 2006;Spierdijk and Vellekoop 2009). Although it has not been analyzed so far, expert juries and audiences may also be affected by cultural convergence to different degrees and extents.…”