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At the end of the performances the song which received the largest number of points from other countries is declared the winner. This contest is an annual event where countries have musicians present at a performance in which they will be given a score (for artistic merit) according to a voting rule set. In this paper the authors investigate the biases and collusion between countries participating the Eurovision Song Contest as a source of insight into the dynamics of different cultures joining together. Efforts to understand social dynamics can be greatly assisted through statistical analysis of datasets gathered from communications and events which display preferences in connectivity. Our interconnected world brings together people from different countries and how they connect may depend on a myriad of factors. 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. 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.
#Voting blocs and behaviors full
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. 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. 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. 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. The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers.