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

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The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will be awarded a set of scores from other participating countries based upon a quality assessment of a performance. There is a question of whether the countries will vote exclusively according to the artistic merit of the song, or if the vote will be a public signal of national support for another country. Since the competition aims to bring people together, any consistent biases in the awarding of scores would defeat the purpose of the celebration of expression and this has attracted researchers to investigate the supporting evidence for biases. This paper builds upon an approach which produces a set of random samples from an unbiased distribution of score allocation, and extends the methodology to use the full set of years of the competition's life span which has seen fundamental changes to the voting schemes adopted. By building up networks from statistically significant edge sets of vote allocations during a set of years, the results display a plausible network for the origins of the culture anchors for the preferences of the awarded votes. With 60 years of data, the results support the hypothesis of regional collusion and biases arising from proximity, culture and other irrelevant factors in regards to the music which that alone is intended to affect the judgment of the contest.

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  • Alexander V. Mantzaris & Samuel R. Rein & Alexander D. Hopkins, 2018. "Examining Collusion and Voting Biases Between Countries During the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1957," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 21(1), pages 1-1.
    • Handle: RePEc:jas:jasssj:2017-70-3
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    1. Laura Spierdijk & Michel Vellekoop, 2009. "The structure of bias in peer voting systems: lessons from the Eurovision Song Contest," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 36(2), pages 403-425, May.
    2. Saavedra, Serguei & Efstathiou, Janet & Reed-Tsochas, Felix, 2007. "Identifying the underlying structure and dynamic interactions in a voting network," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 377(2), pages 672-688.
    3. Chaoming Song & Shlomo Havlin & Hernán A. Makse, 2005. "Self-similarity of complex networks," Nature, Nature, vol. 433(7024), pages 392-395, January.
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    1. Alexander V. Mantzaris & Samuel R. Rein & Alexander D. Hopkins, 2018. "Preference and neglect amongst countries in the Eurovision Song Contest," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 377-390, September.
    2. Budzinski, Oliver & Gänßle, Sophia & Weimar, Daniel, 2023. "Disentangling individual biases in jury voting: An empirical analysis of voting behavior in the Eurovision Song Contest," Ilmenau Economics Discussion Papers 171, Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics.

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