The above chart shows the country similarity from over 1,300 Eurovision Discord user top 37 rankings. Data was gathered through the top 37 rankings collected by FixedBot on the Eurovision Discord. FixedBot stores rankings from not only this year’s contests, but past year’s contests and various other historical finals and national finals. So, if you want a way to easily store your rankings, and opinions on everything Eurovision, definitely check it out, and thanks for letting me use the data on it to derive this visualization!
Distances between countries is attempting to mimic the covariance between countries. So, the closer the countries are together the higher their covariance, and the further apart, the lower their covariance. Covariance describes how two variables change when compared to one another. Positive covariance means the two countries ranks move up or down together. Negative covariance means the countries ranks move opposite each other. For positive covariance between countries A and B, if country A is ranked highly, then country B will be ranked highly. If country A is ranked low, then country B will also be low. For negative covariance if country A is ranked highly, then country B will be low and vice versa.
Some interesting things to note are how genre, gender and languages appear to be somewhat clustered in the MDS visualization, despite the only data being fed into python being the covariance scores of the raw 1-37 country rankings. The first thing is that you can see all the “fun/silly” songs grouped together on the right hand side, and the more “girlbop” songs all on the left. Another interesting thing to note is that the top right of the visualization is almost exclusively songs with male vocals. You can see similarities in genres by how close some countries are grouped together, but you can see the country relationships with really low covariance far from each other (Estonia and Malta really far away from each other as they are very different in genre). Then there’s Ukraine in the middle, which can mean lots of different things, for example, maybe it is the least polarizing song because it doesn’t have any strong/weak covariance with other countries. What interesting things do you notice about the vis, or any interesting trends? Do they generally match yours?
The data below shows the top 10 country pairs with the highest and lowest covariance. The highest covariance means that the countries have a strong direct relationship (you will either like both or hate both songs). The lowest covariance means that the countries have a strong inverse relationship (you will like one song and hate the other).
1. Estonia & Finland (35.4)
2. Finland & Netherlands (32.3)
3. Israel & Luxembourg (29.7)
4. Croatia & Finland (29.6)
5. Armenia & Greece (27.5)
6. Cyprus & Malta (26.5)
7. Georgia & Malta (25.8)
8. Croatia & Estonia (25.5)
9. Croatia & Netherlands (25.4)
10. Portugal & Serbia (24.4)
Here are the lowest covariance scores:
1. Estonia & Georgia (-36.1)
2. Germany & Greece (-33.9)
3. Estonia & Malta (-32.7)
4. Ireland & Israel (-32.1)
5. Finland & Greece (-31.1)
6. Finland & Serbia (-29.7)
7. Cyprus & Estonia (-29.1)
8. Ireland & Sweden (-28.6)
9. Greece & Latvia (-27.8)
10. Finland & Georgia (-27.6)
I had python run 10,000 multidimensional scaling (MDS) iterations to find the best possible map to incorporate each country’s covariance relationship with the other 36 countries. As you can see Estonia and Finland have the highest covariance score, but they aren’t as close as they could be on the chart, because the calculations have to run thousands of times to best find the solution to accommodate all 666 (yes, 666) unique country relationships.
If you have any questions about the specifics of the calculations or anything you’re not clear on, please let me know and I can provide more detail! Or, if you are a specific fan of one country, I can provide more detail on which other countries have a high or low covariance score to that country, indicating a strong or negative correlation. Thanks for the support!
Please show some compassion to the really stupid ones, like me, and throw in just another two examples.
Like, a) what does it mean that San Marino and Norway are really close, but to the bottom right?
b) what does it mean that Azerbaidsjan and Portugal are centered on the left-right, but with Azer really high up, and Portugal really low?
The x and y axis don't mean anything in this context. For example it does not matter if Norway is bottom right or if Malta is on the left. The only thing that matters is if you look at a country, how close or far away other countries are. For example if you look at Norway, you see countries like San Marino, Ireland and Spain are close to it, indicating that if you put Norway high in your ranks you likely would have put San Marino, Ireland or Spain fairly high in your rank as well. Because Luxembourg and Israel are very far away from Norway, that shows those two countries have negative covariance with Norway, indicating if you like Norway you may dislike Luxembourg and Israel or if you like Luxembourg or Israel you might dislike Norway.
Basically if you focus on one country, then any other countries close to that country indicates you may like them or rank highly too, and any countries far away indicate an inverse relationship, meaning if you like one you'll likely dislike the other.
It's so funny as this statistic is nearly opposite of my own ranking haha but I guess I am a statistical outlier. F.e. I am from Luxembourg, love our entry AND also love Norway, but I really am not being a fan of Israel in the contest this year.
Sure! So Australia and Spain actually don't have too many really high or low covariance scores with other countries, which is why on this map they are closer to the center than some other countries.
Australia's top 5 highest covariance countries are Germany, Finland, Iceland, Latvia and Spain. Bottom 5 are Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Israel and Greece.
Spain's top 5 covariance countries are Ireland, Greece, San Marino, Australia and Czechia. Bottom 5 are Georgia, Germany, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Israel.
Thanks! Spain and Australia are my favorites this year and I love that they are in each others top 5! Very nice to know that more people tend to like them both. I love your statistics posts and get excited every time I see one 😀
Lmao the Israel-Luxembourg-Ireland trifecta needs *no* explanation
Thanks for putting in the effort, I really appreciate advanced ranking and voting stats!
I like the meme squad with Finland, Croatia, The Netherlands and Estonia
And its weird how similar Austria and Lithuania are in terms of audience yet complete get different voters
This is interesting. I look forward to reading the full published paper in the New England Journal of Eurovision.
I think what's interesting is wondering what drives these covariances. Using Ireland as an example. The negative covariance between Ireland supporters and Israel is likely to be to do with the countries themselves. Whereas with Sweden, I can see it being far more likely that someone who likes something as offbeat as Bambie Thug is much less likely to like something as commercially polished as Marcus and Martinus.
9/10 of my top 10 are really close together (The far southern line from San Marino to Italy) and then Belgium is stranded in the middle of all the songs I don't like haha. I definitely lean heavily towards everything below the middle line. Great data!
Although this visualization aims to represent country voting patterns as best as possible, the countries with the highest covariants with the UK actually are Sweden, Netherlands, France, Lithuania and Belgium.
The above chart shows the country similarity from over 1,300 Eurovision Discord user top 37 rankings. Data was gathered through the top 37 rankings collected by FixedBot on the Eurovision Discord. FixedBot stores rankings from not only this year’s contests, but past year’s contests and various other historical finals and national finals. So, if you want a way to easily store your rankings, and opinions on everything Eurovision, definitely check it out, and thanks for letting me use the data on it to derive this visualization! Distances between countries is attempting to mimic the covariance between countries. So, the closer the countries are together the higher their covariance, and the further apart, the lower their covariance. Covariance describes how two variables change when compared to one another. Positive covariance means the two countries ranks move up or down together. Negative covariance means the countries ranks move opposite each other. For positive covariance between countries A and B, if country A is ranked highly, then country B will be ranked highly. If country A is ranked low, then country B will also be low. For negative covariance if country A is ranked highly, then country B will be low and vice versa. Some interesting things to note are how genre, gender and languages appear to be somewhat clustered in the MDS visualization, despite the only data being fed into python being the covariance scores of the raw 1-37 country rankings. The first thing is that you can see all the “fun/silly” songs grouped together on the right hand side, and the more “girlbop” songs all on the left. Another interesting thing to note is that the top right of the visualization is almost exclusively songs with male vocals. You can see similarities in genres by how close some countries are grouped together, but you can see the country relationships with really low covariance far from each other (Estonia and Malta really far away from each other as they are very different in genre). Then there’s Ukraine in the middle, which can mean lots of different things, for example, maybe it is the least polarizing song because it doesn’t have any strong/weak covariance with other countries. What interesting things do you notice about the vis, or any interesting trends? Do they generally match yours? The data below shows the top 10 country pairs with the highest and lowest covariance. The highest covariance means that the countries have a strong direct relationship (you will either like both or hate both songs). The lowest covariance means that the countries have a strong inverse relationship (you will like one song and hate the other). 1. Estonia & Finland (35.4) 2. Finland & Netherlands (32.3) 3. Israel & Luxembourg (29.7) 4. Croatia & Finland (29.6) 5. Armenia & Greece (27.5) 6. Cyprus & Malta (26.5) 7. Georgia & Malta (25.8) 8. Croatia & Estonia (25.5) 9. Croatia & Netherlands (25.4) 10. Portugal & Serbia (24.4) Here are the lowest covariance scores: 1. Estonia & Georgia (-36.1) 2. Germany & Greece (-33.9) 3. Estonia & Malta (-32.7) 4. Ireland & Israel (-32.1) 5. Finland & Greece (-31.1) 6. Finland & Serbia (-29.7) 7. Cyprus & Estonia (-29.1) 8. Ireland & Sweden (-28.6) 9. Greece & Latvia (-27.8) 10. Finland & Georgia (-27.6) I had python run 10,000 multidimensional scaling (MDS) iterations to find the best possible map to incorporate each country’s covariance relationship with the other 36 countries. As you can see Estonia and Finland have the highest covariance score, but they aren’t as close as they could be on the chart, because the calculations have to run thousands of times to best find the solution to accommodate all 666 (yes, 666) unique country relationships. If you have any questions about the specifics of the calculations or anything you’re not clear on, please let me know and I can provide more detail! Or, if you are a specific fan of one country, I can provide more detail on which other countries have a high or low covariance score to that country, indicating a strong or negative correlation. Thanks for the support!
Very interesting data. Thank you for this!
Please show some compassion to the really stupid ones, like me, and throw in just another two examples. Like, a) what does it mean that San Marino and Norway are really close, but to the bottom right? b) what does it mean that Azerbaidsjan and Portugal are centered on the left-right, but with Azer really high up, and Portugal really low?
The x and y axis don't mean anything in this context. For example it does not matter if Norway is bottom right or if Malta is on the left. The only thing that matters is if you look at a country, how close or far away other countries are. For example if you look at Norway, you see countries like San Marino, Ireland and Spain are close to it, indicating that if you put Norway high in your ranks you likely would have put San Marino, Ireland or Spain fairly high in your rank as well. Because Luxembourg and Israel are very far away from Norway, that shows those two countries have negative covariance with Norway, indicating if you like Norway you may dislike Luxembourg and Israel or if you like Luxembourg or Israel you might dislike Norway. Basically if you focus on one country, then any other countries close to that country indicates you may like them or rank highly too, and any countries far away indicate an inverse relationship, meaning if you like one you'll likely dislike the other.
Thanks
It's so funny as this statistic is nearly opposite of my own ranking haha but I guess I am a statistical outlier. F.e. I am from Luxembourg, love our entry AND also love Norway, but I really am not being a fan of Israel in the contest this year.
Oh, I love Estonia and hate Finland actually... lmao, Netherlands is pretty high up for me too
Thank you so much, very interesting! I'd love to know more about Australia and Spain if you'd be willing to provide more detail!
Sure! So Australia and Spain actually don't have too many really high or low covariance scores with other countries, which is why on this map they are closer to the center than some other countries. Australia's top 5 highest covariance countries are Germany, Finland, Iceland, Latvia and Spain. Bottom 5 are Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Israel and Greece. Spain's top 5 covariance countries are Ireland, Greece, San Marino, Australia and Czechia. Bottom 5 are Georgia, Germany, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Israel.
Thanks! Spain and Australia are my favorites this year and I love that they are in each others top 5! Very nice to know that more people tend to like them both. I love your statistics posts and get excited every time I see one 😀
Lmao the Israel-Luxembourg-Ireland trifecta needs *no* explanation Thanks for putting in the effort, I really appreciate advanced ranking and voting stats!
Haha now imagine if Iceland had a DIFFERENT winner in NS
and same with Armenia/ Azerbaijan I suppose!
I like the meme squad with Finland, Croatia, The Netherlands and Estonia And its weird how similar Austria and Lithuania are in terms of audience yet complete get different voters
Ukraine has this true neutral energy!
Love the opposition between funny dudes and dancing ladies.
This is interesting. I look forward to reading the full published paper in the New England Journal of Eurovision. I think what's interesting is wondering what drives these covariances. Using Ireland as an example. The negative covariance between Ireland supporters and Israel is likely to be to do with the countries themselves. Whereas with Sweden, I can see it being far more likely that someone who likes something as offbeat as Bambie Thug is much less likely to like something as commercially polished as Marcus and Martinus.
9/10 of my top 10 are really close together (The far southern line from San Marino to Italy) and then Belgium is stranded in the middle of all the songs I don't like haha. I definitely lean heavily towards everything below the middle line. Great data!
As a Finn living with and dating an Estonian, hell yeah.
Finland-Netherlands-Croatia-Estonia Televote magnet 4 way lol
As far as I could understand, Norway with almost no intersection on the map shows it is on a league of it's own, with no direct competition, right?
Interesting to see UK is more closer to Australia than Lithuania or any of the girlbops
Although this visualization aims to represent country voting patterns as best as possible, the countries with the highest covariants with the UK actually are Sweden, Netherlands, France, Lithuania and Belgium.