The Eurovision Song Contest has been on again (strangely, Australia has now become part of Europe). On the whole, I didn’t think much of the songs this year, although Ieva Zasimauskaite from Lithuania did sing an interesting song about love and marriage:
As usual, the voting is the really interesting aspect. This year, I’ve done an analysis where:
- I looked at combined country votes in the final (jury plus televoting)
- I assumed that countries would have given themselves the maximum score of 24
The diagram below shows a “cultural map” of Europe produced by multi-dimensional scaling of the votes by each country. That is, countries with similar tastes are located close to each other.
For example, Germany and the Netherlands have similar tastes. They both gave 6 or more points to Germany, Israel, Cyprus, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. They both gave at most 2 points to Moldova, Albania, France, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, Finland, Slovenia, Hungary, Portugal, and the UK. They differed on the remaining seven countries.
Colouring in the diagram is by the second principal component of the voting, which defines a cultural north-south axis.
Scientific Gems 
As in previous years, the UK has pretty much an average European taste.
What ?
In the sense that the UK generally votes the way that Europe as a whole does. However, that effect was actually rather weak this year: Spain’s vote was the best indicator of overall European taste.