Country vs. Music: Strategic Incentives for Competing Voters

We empirically analyze the strategic proofness of a positional voting system. We exploit the setting of the Eurovision Song Contest, where each country participates both as a candidate — with an artist and a song — and with a set of voters, — including jury members, and the popular vote – and where voters attribute points according to a modified version of the Borda rule. Despite voters being forbidden from voting their country’s song, we find evidence of strategic behavior in the competition final, particularly among industry experts (jury members), who tend to attribute lower votes to close competitors of their country’s candidate. By matching Eurovision voting data to Spotify data on success and musical featuresof each competing song, we show that this behaviour is not explained by intrinsic quality or commercial success of individual songs, but is rather driven by strategic considerations. Strategic voting potentially aspects any settings where voters have an interest in specific candidates being elected, a relevant example being the election of members of international bodies: our analysis provides empirical evidence that forbidding votes for own candidates is not enough to neutralize strategic behavior.