Statistics - Lalit Magantihttps://lalitm.com/tags/statistics/2026-05-17T16:10:05ZLalit MagantiHugo -- gohugo.ioWhich country voted the best at Eurovision?https://lalitm.com/post/which-country-voted-best-at-eurovision/2026-05-17T15:30:00+01:002026-05-17T15:30:00+01:00<p>Eurovision was on yesterday. I’ve never been interested much in the musical side
but the weird political dynamics of Eurovision voting have always fascinated me;
I tune in each year just for them and somewhat snarky commentary of Graham
Norton, the UK commentator.</p>
<p>As I was watching the jury votes come in, a question popped into my head: Which
country has <em>voted</em> the best in Eurovision? That is, which country was best at
picking the eventual top 10 and in the right order?</p>
<p>Strangely enough, while there’s
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_at_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest#Regional_bloc_voting">plenty</a>
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0505071">of</a>
<a href="https://www.jasss.org/9/2/1.html">work</a> on voting blocs and bilateral biases at
Eurovision, most of it asks <em>who votes for whom</em>; I wanted to ask <em>who votes
accurately</em>. I couldn’t find anyone asking the question that way, so I decided
to do some data analysis myself.</p>
<h2 id="the-metric">The metric</h2>
<p>To begin to answer this question, I first needed to formalize what “best” even
means. That is, some mathematical notion of “good” and “bad”.</p>