Culturally-Biased Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: Do National Contests Differ?

51 Pages Posted: 19 Dec 2014

See all articles by Oliver Budzinski

Oliver Budzinski

Ilmenau University of Technology

Julia Pannicke

Ilmenau University of Technology

Date Written: December 15, 2014

Abstract

The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally-biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with principally the same rules but organized on the national level in Germany, offers a unique opportunity to compare international voting bias patterns to national voting bias patterns. Thus, this paper presents an innovative analysis by comparatively analyzing the ESC´s historical data from 1998 to 2013 and the BSC´s data from its beginning in 2005 until 2013 with the same econometric methodology. Our results show that voting biases do not only matter in international contests but also occur in similarly-organized national contests with roughly similar magnitude and quality – despite the cultural background of participants and voters being much more homogenous.

Keywords: Eurovision Song Contest, Bundesvision Song Contest, culturally-biased voting, media economics, cultural economics

JEL Classification: L82, Z10

Suggested Citation

Budzinski, Oliver and Pannicke, Julia, Culturally-Biased Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: Do National Contests Differ? (December 15, 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2540074 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2540074

Oliver Budzinski (Contact Author)

Ilmenau University of Technology ( email )

Ilmenau, D-98684
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/wth

Julia Pannicke

Ilmenau University of Technology ( email )

Ilmenau, D-98684
Germany

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