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Measuring Cultural Dynamics Through The Eurovision Song Contest

Author

Listed:
  • DAVID GARCÍA

    (Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland)

  • DORIAN TANASE

    (Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland)

Abstract

Measuring culture and its dynamics through surveys has important limitations, but the emerging field of computational social science allows us to overcome them by analyzing large-scale datasets. In this paper, we study cultural dynamics through the votes in the Eurovision song contest, which are decided by a crowd-based scheme in which viewers vote through mobile phone messages. Taking into account asymmetries and imperfect perception of culture, we measure cultural relations among European countries in terms of cultural affinity. We propose the Friend-or-Foe coefficient, a metric to measure voting biases among participants of a Eurovision contest. We validate how this metric represents cultural affinity through its relation with known cultural distances, and through numerical analysis of biased Eurovision contests. We apply this metric to the historical set of Eurovision contests from 1975 to 2012, finding new patterns of stronger modularity than using votes alone. Furthermore, we define a measure of polarization that, when applied to empirical data, shows a sharp increase within EU countries during 2010 and 2011. We empirically validate the relation between this polarization and economic indicators in the EU, showing how political decisions influence both the economy and the way citizens relate to the culture of other EU members.

Suggested Citation

  • David García & Dorian Tanase, 2013. "Measuring Cultural Dynamics Through The Eurovision Song Contest," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(08), pages 1-33.
  • Handle: RePEc:wsi:acsxxx:v:16:y:2013:i:08:n:s0219525913500379
    DOI: 10.1142/S0219525913500379
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Axelrod, Robert & Tesfatsion, Leigh, 2006. "A Guide for Newcomers to Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences," Staff General Research Papers Archive 12515, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    2. Kokko, Ari & Gustavsson Tingvall, Patrik, 2012. "The Eurovision Song Contest, Preferences and European Trade," Ratio Working Papers 183, The Ratio Institute.
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    Cited by:

    1. David Garcia & Frank Schweitzer, 2015. "Social signals and algorithmic trading of Bitcoin," Papers 1506.01513, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2015.
    2. Oliver Budzinski & Julia Pannicke, 2017. "Culturally biased voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: Do national contests differ?," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 41(4), pages 343-378, November.
    3. Buda, Andrzej & Kwapień, Jarosław, 2022. "Agent-based modelling of the global phonographic market," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 598(C).
    4. 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.
    5. Aloys Prinz, 2017. "Rankings as coordination games: the Dutch Top 2000 pop song ranking," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 41(4), pages 379-401, November.
    6. Juan Miguel Carrascosa & Ruben Cuevas & Roberto Gonzalez & Arturo Azcorra & David Garcia, 2015. "Quantifying the Economic and Cultural Biases of Social Media through Trending Topics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-14, July.

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