Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 19th May 2013

Which country would be the winners of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest if past voting history/bloc voting patterns were taken out of the equation? Premised on the fact that certain countries come to Eurovision with some degree of an advantage over others due to be able to rely on consistent support levels from some other Eurovision countries due to friends and neighbours voting and/or diaspora voting, expected votes tallies (irrespective of other factors such as song quality, performance, draw position) were calculated based on what level of support each of the 26 finalists would have received from the 38 other countries voting in last night’s final. The voting history estimates were then calculated with the actual number of points won at last night’s contest in order to determine which countries especially improved/disimproved on the level of support that would have been expected for that country on the basis of past Eurovision voting trends.

The table above shows that actual contest winners, Denmark, was the country that improved its position to the greatest degree relative to its expect points tally based on past voting patterns, with Denmark’s 281 points tally in the final being well in excess of the 97 points that country would have been expected to win based on previous Eurovision voting trends. Most of the other countries to experience significantly higher points tallies relative to their past history points estimates tended to be mainly from Western Europe, with Norway and The Netherlands figuring prominently among this group of countries, although two Eastern European countries, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, also produced significantly better-than-expected results at last night’s contest.

At the other end of the scale, Armenia’s 41 points from last night’s final was well below (by 125 points) the level that country would have been predicted to win based on previous Eurovision voting trends, while there was also a similarly significant drop in points relative to the expected points tally for this year’s contest hosts, Sweden.

Tags: Eurovision, Voting

This entry was posted on May 19, 2013 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Eurovision, Eurovision politics?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.