Adrian Kavanagh, 22nd May 2015
I have used this model to successfully predict the Azerbaijan win at the 2011 contest and Denmark win in 2013, while this same model correctly identified 17 of the 20 qualifiers from this year’s semi finals. Now that we know the running order for the 2015 Eurovision Final I am going to use this to try and tease out who the likely winners will be of the 2015 contest will be. There are, however, a variety of factors that suggest that the 2015 Final model may not be as accurate as in previous years (and particularly before the new rules on combining jury votes and televotes were introduced at recent contests).
With the numbers crunched, Sweden and Russia – both with relatively good positions in the contest running order, a tendency to do well in terms of “friends and neighbours” and “diaspora” voting and very high rankings in the bookies odds – stand on top of the pile. Azerbaijan, Italy, Australia and Serbia also figure strongly here. But be wary.
- This model cannot take account of the impact of the actual performances on Final nights (jury show and public show).
- As the voting history statistics are based mainly on past televoting trends, the model cannot take account for the voting decisions of the highly influential professional juries, who have as much bearing on the result as the televotes have (if not more).
- There are no voting history statistics for Australia, so there is no real sense here as to how the Australian televote will go, nor is there any real sense as to where Australia is more likely to pick up Eurovision points.
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