Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 21st December 2015

The split voting results for the 2015 Junior Eurovision Song Contest were released today on the official contest website. In terms of Ireland’s vote patterns, some unexpected results emerge here. Aimee Banks’ Realt Na Mara was viewed as a quality, yet more challenging, entry, which was expected to rank higher amongst the jury voters than the amongst the public vote/televote, especially given that Ireland had relatively few “friends” among the other countries that were competing/also voting in this year’s contest. But it transpired that Aimee fared notably better amongst the televoters than amongst the professional jury voters – finishing in 10th place with 43 points in the televote, but finishing in 14th place with 19 points in the jury vote.

As opposed to the trend established at (the senior) Eurovision in recent years, the final/combined score was not based on a combined ranking of all of the televote/jury vote rankings, but was instead just based on the Top 10 rankings for both the public vote and the professional jury vote.

In the televote component, Aimee fared notably strongest amongst the Malta televote, with Realt Na Mara ranked 4th best of the songs on the night by the Maltese televoters (7 points), with other strong showings in the Slovenia (6 points), Netherlands (6 points), Russia (5 points), Belarus (4 points) and Bulgaria (4 points) televotes. Aimee would have won points off nine of the (other) countries that had a televote on the night, while failing to win points off five of these countries. In the jury vote, Aimee’s strongest ranking came from the FYR Macedonia, Australia and Georgia juries (5 points each), with the only other juries to award her points being the Malta (3 points) and San Marino (1 point) juries. As there were no televotes for San Marino and Australia, these jury score also counted as Aimee’s overall points tally from those states. Ironically, in the cases of Georgia and FYR Macedonia, the relatively high jury scores from these countries were offset by the low televote rankings for Ireland from these countries. In the end Ireland took 0 points off Macedonia and 2 points off Georgia in the final, combined, points scores.

Ireland was not the only country to send a challenging. quality, entry to Junior Eurovision, only to find themselves penalised by a low score from the professional juries. The same trend was also observed for Ukraine’s Anna Trincher, who won 16 fewer points off the professional juries, relative to her televote score. The fact that Slovenia’s Lina Kudozovic fared less well in the jury vote than in the televote (but particularly in the other Former Yugoslav countries) was also a source of some surprise. Referring to both Lina and Aimee, the WiwiBloggs website noted that: “Prior to the contest, both girls would have been considered by many to be potential jury favourites”.

At a first glance, the jury vote and professional vote differentials may not seem to have had too much impact on the overall Junior Eurovision result, given that the first two placed countries, Malta and Armenia, occupied the exact same positions/rankings in the overall televote as in the overall jury vote (and indeed the final/combined result). Belarus would have edged Slovenia out of third place, however, had the contest been decided solely on the basis of jury votes. At the other end of the table, FYR Macedonia finished last in the jury vote rankings (as they did in the overall contest scores), but The Netherlands were ranked in last position in the overall televote rankings.

The countries that gained the most advantage from the jury vote were (in order):

• The Netherlands (won 44 points more from the jury vote and were ranked eight places higher in this)
• Belarus (won 40 points more from the jury vote and were ranked four places higher in this)
• Australia (won 35 points more from the jury vote and were ranked six places higher in this)
• Italy (won 30 points more from the jury vote and were ranked six places higher in this)
• Serbia (won 20 points more from the jury vote and were ranked three places higher in this)

The countries that gained the most advantage from the public vote/televote were (in order):

• Bulgaria (won 63 points more from the televote and were ranked eleven places higher in this)
• San Marino (won 36 points more from the televote and were ranked six places higher in this)
• Ireland (won 24 points more from the jury vote and were ranked four places higher in this)
• Slovenia (won 21 points more from the jury vote and were ranked one place higher in this)
• Albania (won 17 points more from the jury vote and were ranked two places higher in this)

Ironically, most of the countries seen to have benefited especially from the televote (or to have been penalised especially from the jury vote) are countries that have struggled to win televote points due to “friends and neighbours” voting and “diaspora” voting during the 2000s (and especially since the introduction of televoting in 1998). These were the types of Eurovision countries that the (re)introduction of the jury vote was meant to help, but in a number of cases jury votes have often tended to penalise such countries.

By contrast, televoters showed a notably lower propensity to vote mainly for acts from the same region than they have in past contest. In the televotes of the Former Soviet countries, Slovenia (with an average of 7.4 points) and Malta (with an average of 8.0 points) both fared especially well. By contrast, high televote scores in the Former Yugoslav countries for other Former Yugoslav countries, such as FYR Macedonia and Slovenia, were offset by the relatively low jury votes awarded to these states.

Tags: Eurovision, Voting

This entry was posted on December 21, 2015 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Eurovision, Junior Eurovision, Voting analysis. 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.