It is not just about the melody: How Europe votes for its favourite songs

Abstract

The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular annual international song competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union. The winner is decided by the audience and expert juries from each participating nation, which is why the analysis of its voting network offers a great insight into what factors, beside the quality of the performances, influence the voting decisions.

In this paper, we present the findings of the analysis of the voting network together with the results of a predictive model based on the collected data. We touch upon the methodology used and describe the dataset that we are analyzing. The results include a number of general features of the voting networks, the exposed communities of countries that award significantly more points to each other than would be expected and predictions on what the biggest factors that lead to this phenomenon are. Multiple known favourable relationships are exposed, such as the one between Greece and Cyprus, between Scandinavian countries and between the countries of the former Yugoslavia. A general trend of neighbouring countries forming alliances is observed, which is especially apparent if they are culturally or geographically separated from others. Furthermore, it is also observed how membership in communities of common point exchange helps achieve better results in the competition and that this trend is on the rise. At the same time, countries involved in relationships of neglect often achieve poorer results. We also try out a model in order to predict the votes based on the network structure of both previous votes and song preferences of nations, which was found not to offer significant improvement of predictions compared to betting tables alone.