Is The Eurovision Song Contest Rigged?

FiveThirtyEight Politics

ABC News

News, Politics

4.6 • 20.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since 1956, European countries have been gathering each year to compete in the Eurovision song contest -- a competition of largely pop and techno artists that can often feel like a parody of European tastes in music. There have long been accusations of bias in the voting process and last Saturday's competition -- which Sweden won -- was no exception. In this installment of the podcast, Galen speaks with statistics and health economics professor Gianluca Baio, who created a model to determine whether there really are biases advantaging or disadvantaging certain nations. Galen also speaks with Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at the Pew Research Center, who recently published a study showing that the polling industry of today bears little semblance to the polling industry at the start of the century. The days of real human beings randomly dialing landline phones are gone, but what does that mean for the accuracy of public opinion research? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Will interest rates change again?
0:02.0	What's new where I live?
0:04.0	Whatever the question, Google helps people in the UK access reliable news on a wide range of stories.
0:11.0	Learn more at g.co-supportingnews-uk
0:15.0	I think that the very fiber, the nature of the Eurovision Census inception was a very political statement anyway.
0:22.0	It was meant to bring together all the European countries this side of the Iron Curtain
0:29.0	and kind of make a big splash for reunion after the war, so it's by definition a political operation.
0:45.0	Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Gailandrick.
0:49.0	Today's episode should probably come with a nerd warning.
0:53.0	So on Monday's podcast, we joked about polling pollsters about their favorite poll.
0:59.0	And well, today we're going to actually take a look at a poll of pollsters.
1:04.0	Pew Research recently released its findings from a survey of pollsters they've been doing for years.
1:10.0	Essentially, they ask pollsters about the methods they use to reach Americans.
1:16.0	And what they found is that the polling industry of today there's almost no semblance to the polling industry from the year 2000.
1:24.0	At the beginning of the century, there were about 29 national pollsters, all of which almost exclusively relied on real human beings, randomly dialing respondents by phone.
1:35.0	Today, there are about 69 national pollsters and only 4% exclusively use random digit dialing.
1:43.0	The number of pollsters and methods of polling have grown significantly.
1:47.0	So here with me today to talk about what this means for those of us trying to figure out what Americans really think is vice president of methods and innovation at the Pew Research Center Courtney Kennedy.
1:58.0	Welcome to the podcast.
2:00.0	Thank you so much.
2:01.0	I should also mention for any Eurovision fans out there, especially anyone perplexed by last weekend's results, that later in the show I'm going to be joined by a statistics professor from University College of Education.
2:12.0	The University College London who created a Bayesian model, yes, a Bayesian model to detect bias in the Eurovision voting system.
	...

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