Country Music: Positional Voting and Strategic Behavior

We analyze strategic behaviour with positional voting in the context of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). In the ESC, each country participates both as a candidate, by presenting an artist and a song, and as a voter, via jury members and televote, creating an ideal setting for the study of strategic voting. To determine the final ranking, the contest employs a modified version of Borda voting, where voters are prevented from voting for their country’s artist and song. Nevertheless, we find evidence of strategic behaviour among both industry experts (jury members), and televote. In both cases, voters tend to assign lower scores to close competitors of their country’s candidate. We compare strategic voting in the ESC semifinals, where little information on competitors’ strength is available, and strategic voting is more challenging, with the final, when more information has been revealed. Additionally, we investigate whether the intrinsic quality of songs or other external factors may explain our empirical observations, using data retrieved from Spotify and a specialized website. Beyond revealing that forbidding votes for one’s own candidates is not sufficient to eliminate strategic behaviour, our results underscore the crucial role of information provision, specifically the drawbacks of multistage voting procedures where information is revealed during the election. Overall, they highlight the main limitation of Borda voting as an alternative to plurality voting.