[BRIEF NOTE] Eurovision Voting Patterns

[rfmcdonald]

Eurovision, the generations-old perhaps best known for launching ABBA's career (Sweden's 1974 entry was "Waterloo"), has ended for this year and Greece's entry, singer Helen Pararizou, won with her song "My Number One." The Economist has highlighted an interesting paper--"'How does Europe Make Its Mind Up? Connections, cliques, and compatibility between countries in the Eurovision Song Contest'", by Daniel Fenn, Omer Suleman, Janet Efstathiou and Neil F Johnson--examining the voting patterns of each country involved. Their conclusions?

Voting cliques were immediately apparent, with geographical gangs of countries that show a strong tendency to vote for each other, such as the Nordic bunch, and political allegiances between countries such as Greece and Cyprus. But some cliques, such as that between Croatia and Malta, defied explanation, with no obvious geographical or political connection.

More intriguing, though, were apparent cultural affinities. Britain turned out to be part of the European in-crowd. Its voting patterns were even-handed and close to the norm. France and Spain, by contrast, were outliers in the scoring system--though not because they were parts of voting cliques. Instead, Dr Johnson suggests, the French and Spanish judges behaved as though they had inflexible views about the right type of song, only to find that the views of all the other countries had moved on with the times.