18-05-2025
The maths behind the public votes at Eurovision 2025
Pollster Kevin Cunningham explains how the nature of Eurovision voting influenced the outcome
When it comes to the public votes cast at the Eurovision, we need to take elements like 'diffuse alternatives' and 'motivated reasoning' into consideration. This is according to Dr Kevin Cunningham, a lecturer in politics at TU Dublin and the founder of the Ireland Thinks polling company.
First, there's 'diffuse alternatives', Cunningham explains. "If Israel were on the ballot, let's say, and that was the principal thing people were voting on, there's only one Israeli option and 24 other non-Israel options. So that means that the relative concentration of support within the Israeli option tends to be a little bit higher."
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland in May 2024, why did Ireland give Israel 10 points at Eurovision 2024?
So what vote share would we expect Israel to have gotten to get to second place? "If we look at the result from previous years' Eurovision finals, the second place got around 13 or 14% in the last two years, so we might expect that it only takes 13 or 14% for someone to actually get to 2nd place. That means that quite a large proportion might actually have been voting for others."
We also have to take 'motivated reasoning' into consideration. "We see this in politics when it comes to turnout in elections and turnout in referendums", explains Cunningham. "When we see turnout in referendums become very low we notice that the results become quite skewed. If turnout in a referendum gets lower than 35% the people who are more motivated, more interested, tend to influence the outcome a little bit more".
In the case of Eurovision, it's even more extreme. "Because we know that even of those that viewed the Eurovision, only around 6 or 7%, from previous data, actually vote", says Cunningham, "so it means that it's at the extreme end. But then what accentuates this even more is the number of times that you can vote. You can vote up to 20 times so that influences it to a massive degree in reality.
"You could imagine there are certain people who vote once or twice for a given song, and then there might be some people who vote 20 times for the exact same song or country. By definition, taken together with the low turnout and also the scale in which people might be voting, it necessitates, basically, an extreme preference for whoever tends to win, or otherwise. If you imagine a room of 100 people and 99 of them vote once, and one of them votes 20 times, based on our sums, you could expect that one to actually win."
