May 13, 2004
Abusing Network Analysis to Understand Eurovision
Last year, Kieran Healy wrote
The anonymous juries pass judgement on the cultural worth of their neighbors, which makes for indignation and outrage all round. Ireland, for instance, is well known for generously forgetting 600 years of English oppression and routinely giving the British entry a decent vote. The Brits, by contrast, rarely vote for Ireland at all, except perhaps to give it a derisory deux or trois points, which is almost worse than nothing. (This may not be true, by the way, but these prejudices are themselves an important fact about the contest.) Similarly, the Scandinavian nations have been known to do a lot of neighborly backscratching.
This year, he tested it.
May 13, 2004 06:13 PM | TrackBack | in Social NetworksConfining ourselves to a group of countries who competed during (almost) all these years, we can aggregate their voting scores into a directed graph representing their preferences for one another’s songs over the years. Given that Eurovision songs are (to a first approximation) uniformly worthless, we can assume that votes express a simple preference for one nation over another, uncomplicated by any aesthetic considerations.