Partisanship at Eurovision is becoming more blatant
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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.
Eligibility simply requires the country to have a broadcaster that is a member of the European Broadcasting Union.
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.
Perhaps it isn't popular in spite of the collusion, but because of it.
Sure, other countries will also receive points, but far fewer, and therefore they are at a disadvantage.
It would be interesting to see the results of such an experiment, though.
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.
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.
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 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.
> Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.
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.
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.
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...
https://eurovision.tv/story/full-voting-results-revealed-by-...
What could go wrong?
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.
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 :)
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.