The Eurovision Song Contest is a popular TV singing competition held annually among country members of the European Broadcasting Union. In this competition, each member can be both contestant and ...jury, as it can participate with a song and/or vote for other countries’ tunes. During the years, the voting system has repeatedly been accused of being biased by tactical voting; votes would represent strategic interests rather than actual musical preferences of the voting countries. In this work, we develop a latent space model to investigate the presence of a latent structure underlying the exchange of votes. Focusing on the period from 1998 to 2015, we represent the vote exchange as a multivariate network: each edition is a network, where countries are the nodes and two countries are linked by an edge if one voted for the other. The different networks are taken to be independent replicates of a conditional Bernoulli distribution, with success probability specified as a function of a common latent space capturing the overall relationships among the countries. Proximity denotes similarity, and countries close in the latent space are more likely to exchange votes. If the exchange of votes depends on the similarity between countries, the quality of the competing songs might not be a relevant factor in the determination of the voting preferences, and this would suggest the presence of some bias. A Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach is employed to estimate the parameters, where the probability of a connection between any two countries is a function of their distance in the latent space, network-specific parameters and edge-specific covariates. The estimated latent space is found to be relevant in the determination of edge probabilities, however, the positions of the countries in such space only partially correspond to their actual geographical positions.
Israel has participated in the Eurovision, the largest European music festival, since 1973. The Jewish state regularly invests substantial resources in the contest and goes to great lengths to shine; ...with four victories, as well as two second places, it has been highly successful. Given its symbolic significance, as well as its actual impact on Israeli cultural diplomacy and nation-branding efforts, the annual media event and the process of selecting an artistic representative frequently elicit values-laden debates. Against this backdrop, the article investigates the evolution of the ways in which Israelis have presented themselves on the Eurovision stage, as well as the country's internal discourse surrounding this annual cultural ritual. Israel's participation in the yearly spectacle, I argue, has become an important element of ongoing Zionist-Israeli nation-building.
The Eurovision Song Contest has long served as a platform for cultural diplomacy among its participants. This paper examines how Russia and Ukraine have approached cultural diplomacy in and around ...the Eurovision Song Contest in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Following an outline of pertinent events from 2014 to 2022, including the Song Contest and the respective countries’ selected entries as well as the public discourse surrounding them, two distinct types of cultural diplomacy—culturalist versus neo-propagandist—are employed in a congruence analysis. The findings show that Russia employed a largely neo-propagandist approach to cultural diplomacy characterized by their projected image of peacefulness, innocence, and strength to alter their situational image. Ukraine has employed a mostly culturalist approach mainly focused on mutual recognition and the representation of national culture. The conscious instrumentalization of the platform to counter misconstrued perceptions of Ukraine shaped by the Kremlin’s rhetoric also adds neo-propagandist elements.
This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of voting bias in the Eurovision Song Contest as a means of capturing societal affinity. More than 180 million viewers from more than 40 countries watch the ...Eurovision Song Contest every year and vote for their favorite songs. Societal affinity between participating countries leads to systematic bias in voting patterns as each song represents a country. Using cross-border mergers as a proxy for international business exchanges, we demonstrate how voting bias provides a simple, freely available, and dynamic means of capturing societal affinity between countries that complements other metrics of affinity and distance.
Australia's participation in the 'Eurovision Song Contest' and involvement in the organisation of the Asian version of Eurovision (the 'Eurovision Asia Song Contest') through broadcaster SBS has been ...celebrated, questioned and criticised. In this article, I examine Australia's role in the organisation of the 'Eurovision Asia Song Contest' in the context of Australia's relationship with the region, and what this reveals about Australia's cultural identity and place in this Asia-Pacific region. If Eurovision was conceived as a post-war project to unify Europe, I argue that for the Eurovision Asia Song Contest to become a reality, it needs to have a framework that takes into account the region's own historical, political and geo-political contexts rather than having a Eurocentric model imposed on it.
This article examines the role of norms and culture in perceptions of the European Union. Conceptually, it offers a distinction between the image of the European Union as a normative actor and ...attitudes toward one's country's relations with the European Union. It also explores whether the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), a cultural event which symbolizes the cultural understanding of contemporary Europe, is related to perceptions of the European Union. Empirically, it uses a public opinion survey (n = 1050) following Israel's hosting of the ESC in 2019. The findings indicate that Israelis distinguish between the image of the European Union as an entity with positive features and their attitudes toward Israel's connections with the European Union.
Amongst the most prominent uses of Twitter is its role in the discussion of widely televised events: Twitter's own statistics for 2011, for example, list major entertainment spectacles (the MTV Music ...Awards and the BET Awards) and sports matches (the UEFA Champions League final and the FIFA Women's World Cup final) amongst the events generating the most tweets per second during the year. During such major media events, Twitter is used most predominantly as a technology of fandom: it serves as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event as it unfolds live. This article examines the use of Twitter as a technology for the expression of shared fandom in the context of a major, internationally televised annual media event: the Eurovision Song Contest. Our analysis draws on comprehensive data sets for the 'official' event hashtags, #eurovision, #esc, and #sbseurovision. Using innovative methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of Twitter data sets containing several hundreds of thousands, overall patterns of participation to discover how audiences express their fandom throughout the event are examined. Such analysis is able to provide a unique insight into the use of Twitter as a technology for fandom and for what in cultural studies research is called 'audiencing': the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event. The work points to Twitter as an important new medium facilitating the connection and communion of fans.
Mega-events can have different types of effects, both tangible and intangible, for host cities or countries. For the case of the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Baku, Azerbaijan, this study ...combines an economic impact study and two country image assessments carried out before and after this mega-event in an emerging tourist destination. Economic impacts are calculated based on on-site, face-to-face visitor surveys during the ESC and an input–output model. Image effects are measured with a representative two-wave online panel in Austria, which was selected as a potential tourist source market for Azerbaijan. The study finds that visitor expenditures produce €3.3 million of direct and indirect income in terms of local wages and salaries. Additionally, Azerbaijan’s image improved significantly through the mega-event, especially with young, cosmopolitan people. Surprisingly, the country’s image significantly improved even among people who did not watch the ESC on TV, due to extensive media coverage.
•Examines the impact of a mega-event on an emerging tourist destination.•Combination of an economic impact study and a country image assessment.•Economic impacts from visitor spending sum up to €3.3 million.•The host country image improves significantly through the mega-event.•The country image even improved among people who did not follow the event.
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