Preference and neglect amongst countries in the Eurovision Song Contest

Alexander V. Mantzaris (), Samuel R. Rein and Alexander D. Hopkins
Additional contact information
Alexander V. Mantzaris: University of Central Florida (UCF)
Samuel R. Rein: University of Central Florida (UCF)
Alexander D. Hopkins: University of Central Florida (UCF)

Journal of Computational Social Science, 2018, vol. 1, issue 2, No 8, 377-390

Abstract: Abstract The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has been a growing source of entertainment for millions of viewers. Countries are represented 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 socio-economic 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 socio-economic ties already exist.

Keywords: Eurovision; Edge dynamics; Network inference; Collusive behavior; Voter behavior; 62-07; 91F99; 91D99 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s42001-018-0020-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jcsosc:v:1:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s42001-018-0020-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... iences/journal/42001

DOI: 10.1007/s42001-018-0020-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Computational Social Science is currently edited by Takashi Kamihigashi

More articles in Journal of Computational Social Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().