Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 12th May 2017

In these past, I used this model to successfully predict the Azerbaijan win at the 2011 contest,  the Denmark win in 2013, the Sweden win at the 2015 contest and Russia’s win in the televote at the 2016 Final, while this same model correctly identified 17 of the 20 qualifiers from the 2015 semi finals (although it proved decidedly less effective in predicting the 2016 qualifiers and predicted only 15 out 20 qualifiers for the 2017 semi finals). Now that we know the running order for the 2016 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 (including the problems in terms of predicting the 2016 and 2017 semi final qualifiers) that suggest that the 2017 Final model may not be as accurate as in previous years (or at least the years leading up to the 2016 contest). The changes being made to the voting process in 2016 effectively mean that each country’s jury vote score and public vote/televote score will be treated as separate entities for this year’s contest – i.e. each country will award two separate scores – a jury vote score and a televote/public vote score. It is the latter of these two different scores/rankings (i.e. the televote score) that this model should be most effective in predicting.

With the numbers crunched, Italy, Sweden, Bulgaria and Portugal stand on top of the pile. Some of these countries have relatively good positions in the contest running order, some have a tendency to do well in terms of “friends and neighbours” and “diaspora” voting and all of these enjoy very high rankings in the bookies odds.  Other countries/finalists, such as Belgium, Romania, the United Kingdom, Armenia and Croatia, also figure strongly in relation to these factors, or some of these factors. But be wary!

• This model cannot take account of the impact of the actual performances on both Final nights (including the Jury Final on the Friday night and Public/Televised Final on the Saturday night).
• 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 Final result as the televotes have.
• The voting history statistics for Australia are quite limited and based on just three contests (2015 Final, 2016 Semi Final 2 and 2016 Final) – contests that Australia finished 5th, 1st and 2nd in respectively – meaning that the Australia vote estimates are somewhat over-estimated as regards this particular factor (especially with countries such as Russia and Serbia not taking part in this year’s Final).

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