After all, EU countries don't exist in isolation and we are heavily influenced by our neighbours (economically, culturally, politically). It only makes sense that this influence makes its way into Eurovision. I think the "partisanship" between countries is part of the spectacle.

I'm not sure what the EU has to do with anything or why EU countries should be different from any of the other competing countries.

I suppose the "partisanship" can be interesting to observe, but considering all the hard work each of the acts have to do I feel it's a shame that they are judged mainly on geographical and political factors rather than on their musical ability and performance.

Despite the name Eurovision is nothing to do with the EU. That's why Israel, Ukraine and Russia sometimes compete.

Actual eligibility is defined by a relic of the early television broadcasting industry, the "European Broadcasting Area" the borders of which correspond to, I think, early telegraph networks.

Exactly. Eurovision is not related to the European Union. Technically, it doesn't even have anything to do with Europe; Australia have been competing in recent years.

Eligibility simply requires the country to have a broadcaster that is a member of the European Broadcasting Union.

I think half the fun of watching it is the collusion.

That's exactly the point of Eurovision. Eurovision is harmless entertainment where people can participate and play the game any way they want. You can make political or cultural points by voting, or create fads and feuds, show solidarity etc.

A Finnish horror rock band wearing masks won because people found it funny to rebel against typical second rate pop from second rate stars.

Bearded man in drag won because people realized that they could trigger homophobes.

Ukraine won 2004, the same year as there was the Orange revolution in Ukraine.

Ukraine won again 2016. Maybe it had something to do with the War in Donbass.

Or maybe these were the best songs

There's a morbid joke that "International Figure Skating is a team sport, played by judges."

Perhaps it isn't popular in spite of the collusion, but because of it.

And even more so when a country manages to break that collusion and win despite the odds that are against them

The effects of partisanship are hugely outweighed by the fact that each country gives points to 10 others, not just one. An extreme case of both the 10 and 12 points going to non-deserving neighbours still leaves 36 points to go elsewhere.

Except that for countries with lots of neighbours, they're likely to consistently receive 10 or 12 points.

Sure, other countries will also receive points, but far fewer, and therefore they are at a disadvantage.

I wonder if the "big 5" would score higher if they weren't qualified for the finals by default. That way their songs would get a lot more exposure and become more familiar to the voters. Usually, people like best what they know.

In my experience, most people only watch the final, so I'm not sure that would make a major difference. And of course, considering how poorly the Big Five perform, it's likely they won't even make it into the final!

It would be interesting to see the results of such an experiment, though.

That would wreck Eurovision though. The reason these countries qualify automatically is because they pay for it, and it's expensive to host. The BBC has hosted Eurovision way more times than most other countries.

Statistically, you would expect them to score higher if that was the case, because it would no longer allow them to be worse than the worst song to qualify.

I love it when people doing bad things get busted by statistical traces they didn't even realize they were leaving. There is a lot more room for this kind of detective work.

These results are not remotely surprising to anyone. It's been long known that closely related countries tend to vote for each other.

And it's not really a matter of people doing bad things, it's simply the general public voting for what they like. It doesn't have to be political at all; maybe people just tend to like songs that are culturally close them.

Look at the graph: Ukraine and Russia vote for each other a lot, despite their political friction.

The other thing is that the "general public" isn't a homogenous bloc.

Political friction might make some members of the 2 million strong ethnic Ukrainian diaspora in Russia more inclined to make gestures of support for Ukraine in television song contests, for example. That public vote from within Russia doesn't get cancelled out if a much larger segment of the Russian public finds songs alluding to Stalinist annexation of the Crimea and repression of the Crimean Tartars actively objectionable.

>And it's not really a matter of people doing bad things, it's simply the general public voting for what they like. It doesn't have to be political at all; maybe people just tend to like songs that are culturally close them.

Voting isn't just by popular vote, though.

Each country has a jury which allocates half of the votes and the other half are allocated based on televoting.

I'm from one of those countries in the list. It has been known that this is the case and that countries vote for neighbors ever since I've first watched Eurovision (in like 2007). I'm really surprised that this isn't common knowledge outside of the circle.

> There has been no such glory for the so-called “Big Five”, who qualify for the final automatically: Germany, Britain, France, Spain and Italy. These countries have rarely collaborated with anyone.

I think I remember some "collaborations" between Turkey and Germany, mostly because of the migration and holiday connections between the two countries.

Not sure if that's statistically significant though.

Yes, Germany always gives 12 points to Turkey, because Turks are the biggest minority.

Why is there a link between Britain and Germany?

The nordic brotherhood is strong

Good luck tonight! I know I will most likely collude.

Non-paywalled link: http://archive.is/ojbuw

Can anyone post a link that's not behind a paywall?

Try Mercury Reader, which can see through this and several other paywalls (and does a great job of cleaning up cluttered sites).

Here's the original paper, which is in an open access journal: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/21/1/1.html

Looks like paywalls become more blatant

Papers published in scientific journals are often discussed on HN.

The original rationale for whether something belongs on HN was "anything that provokes the submitter's intellectual curiosity." That skews towards tech, but all sorts of other things fit inside that "big tent" of ideas.

Not everyone on HN is American. The Eurovision is interesting to a lot of the Anglosphere elsewhere, like the UK, Ireland and Australia.

And to indicate the size of popularity, Eurovision gets ratings of 182 Million viewers [1], which is roughly equal with the 172 Million who watch the Superbowl [2]

[1] https://eurovision.tv/story/Eurovision-2017-reaches-more-tha...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_television_ratings

Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.

  > Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.

Quite the opposite. It's exactly the decentralisation of the vote that caused this.

In the past, when one person or committee per country voted, only the UK and Germany voted disproportionally for each other. After the switch to public voting, lots of countries now vote for their neighbours. Clearly, the general public is less cosmopolitan than that committee, and tends to vote for countries they know or feel related to, or understand the music or cultural references from.

The public is voting and has been for 20 years. This isn't organized collusion, this is people liking their neighbors betters.

People have always been giving more points to their neighbors on average, but not always. In case you don't know, each country gives more than one "vote", ie they assign 12 points to one country, 10 to another, 9 to yet another etc. Usually the 12 go to the sister country (ie US-Canada type relationships), but the rest would be spend in a reasonably fair way.

Please note that while from 1998 to 2008 (the peak years of this contest popularity-wise imo) almost 100% of the vote was coming from the audience (via paid SMS and calls). From 2009 to 2012 audience only accounted for 50% of the votes, the rest was picked by the Eurovision company. From 2012 on, the audience had no real effect on the votes. This is also when things started getting seriously political (Conchita, Ukraine, Russia etc).

It's interesting because I just noticed that the Eurovision followed the same path as most social media during the same timeframe. Trying to make you think you have a choice while you don't, trying to fake popularity as a means of enforcing some agenda etc.

As I understand it currently 50% of the votes come from the public, 50% from judges. Is this not correct ?

That is correct.

There are some small exceptions, such as in San Marino, where their small population (~32,000) and sharing of phone infrastructure with Italy makes it difficult to calculate a valid independent televote. And televotes can sometimes be ruled invalid by the auditor (PwC) if their auditing suggests it has been manipulated.

https://eurovoix.com/2017/03/08/san-marino-ebu-rejects-broad...

And sometimes it's the jury votes that are ruled invalid. This happened in 2015 when both FYR Macedonia and Montenegro were 100% televote:

https://eurovision.tv/story/full-voting-results-revealed-by-...

They had this for a while and it was even more partisan, though I believe the main effect was emigrants voting for their home country (Britain voting for Ireland, Germany voting for Turkey etc).

>Public online poll

What could go wrong?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTqIyx6tBU

Decentralize the vote to the public if you want to see botnets voting. No thanks.

Voting is done by phone or SMS and costs a couple of cents. As far as I know, it's totally legal to vote more, but that means you pay more.

I think this should be changed. I cannot imagine that this pay-to-win mechanic has any positive effects.

Usually it's more than a few cents (i think 0.5 to 2 euros). This is actually a great way to vote and fund the contest at the same time. There's little financial incentive to cheat (it's not like a lottery) so if you spend more money, on average, you care more. Also the amount each individual spends in generally very small (ie a handful of votes) so it's about as democratic as this can get without involving some kind of state-id based authentication.

Also worth pointing out there is a cap on the number of votes you can make (maximum 20), and a time limit of 10 - 15 minutes during which you're able to vote. So no one can vote without paying, but they can't spend more than $8 USD on votes either. (In Australia, a vote costs 55c, about 40c US.)

Of course there's people who can try buying SIM cards & running bots, but in theory that's what the PwC vote auditing and Digame's systems are meant to detect & block.

I did not know any of this. Thank you for adding this.

Would you say the same thing about actual elections? Should billionairres be allowed to buy millions of votes because they care more? Should nations buy votes as a from of propaganda?

The stakes for Eurovision are about as low as a doorstop. If someone cares about it as much as they do about national elections, well quite frankly they deserve the opportunity to buy the vote :) there’s worse things people can obsess about.

It’s a game, it’s a show. Technically, so are politics, but so far Eurovision has not cost any human lives, nor have pensions evaporated. To my knowledge.

Then again, judging by the reaction of some people, that might change soon :)

Real elections have real stakes. Eurovision is just a song contest. Who really cares who wins? You get some glory, and in exchange you have to organise the event the next year.

During the 1990s, Ireland won so much that at some point they were hoping to lose, because they couldn't afford to win again.

But win a real election and you get to set laws and make decisions worth billions of dollars, and influence the lives of millions of people. They couldn't be more different.

Well it does discourage bots, and it finances the contest. I don't really see big downsides, as it's not very expensive either.

That's a technical issue that can be worked on if such will is there.