It’s Decision Time For Our Eurovision Juries Written by Ben Robertson on September 11, 2023 | 2 Comments

Our dearest Norwegians have made it clear they are setting the agenda at the Head of Delegation meeting, and they are already threatening to wield Thor’s Hammer and slam it on the table. Head of Delegation Stig Karlsen believes it is “questionable” that the juries have equal power to the millions of viewers at home. The head of Norway’s Eurovision delegation has set the wheels in motion for an alternative – 30% jury voting, and 70% public vote.

A Reminder On Eurovision’s Televote History

There are numerous reasons to critique that it is just Norway raising this in public as an issue. Norway may have used a jury at Melodi Grand Prix 2023, but for over a decade, its choice for Eurovision has ultimately been a fully public choice, at least for the run-off superfinal. This has resulted in winning acts that have been aimed squarely at being public crowd-pleasers. Europe agrees, and be it acts of angel-winged balladry, space wolves, pop/jojk genre smashes, or a saccharine guide to writing a song, you have to go back all the way to 2017 for Eurovision juries to award more points to a Norwegian act than the public across Europe.

The main point of note is the timing of this statement. Karlsen started discussing this openly after the Eurovision Song Contest 2023. Why? Because it was the first year, since KEiiNO stormed the televote in 2019, that the televote favourite was not the overall winner on the night.

Since the full split voting system was first used in 2016, we have seen four winners of the televote win Eurovision and three that haven’t. Quick conclusion, more often than not, the televoting winner wins. How many Eurovision jury winners have ended up winning the Song Contest overall in the same time period? Two, Loreen and Salvador Sobral.

That’s right. As the system is today, in terms of winning Eurovision chances the televote winner has a 2:1 ratio over the jury winner. Measured over multiple years, the bias is already pretty close to the 30/70 split that Karlsen wants the Contest voting system to replicate.

How Strong Are The Current Televoting Results?

The most rudimentary of statistics make this obvious as well. The average jury winner since 2016 has scored 301 points from this half of the scoreboard. The average televote winner scores 354 – and even taking away Ukraine’s 2022 victory sees this peak over 340 points. In total, only 3 songs have received more than 300 points from the Eurovision juries in this period, but eight songs have surpassed that threshold from televoters.

We never saw these numbers a generation ago – Lordi held the points record in 2006 with 292 points from 36 other competing countries. Käärijä scored 376 from the same number of countries (plus the Rest of the World vote). My off-the-cuff analysis is that in this social media age, it is more likely for the opinions of voters from Ireland to Azerbaijan to agree before and during the Contest on their favourites and vote accordingly than any time before in history.

More so than stubborn jurors at least.

But there’s one thing more frustrating than the recency bias that the Norwegian Head of Delegation shows. It’s that he’s forgetting the nature of this year’s jury landslide queen.

Getting Caught Up In Finland’s Euphoria

I had the privilege of listening to Loreen’s song first in a group of 30-odd journalists in Sweden to comment on the song. Unanimously from the first minute were Eurovision geeks and gals from every part of the nation repeating what became the gospel truth, “This was the one to beat”. The minor question mark was what we know now – the televoting appeal for this number – but from Melfest’s fourth heat through to Liverpool 2023, the narrative was that Sweden had the jury sewn up; ‘Tattoo’ just needed enough televotes to quietly step across the line.

Myself and many others were saying this way back in February. Loreen’s jury landslide, however rare as jury landslides are, was just as anticipated as Käärijä’s televoting tsunami. It’s rare to get an artist of Loreen’s star power, and a vehicle of a song to command that side of the leaderboard.

The ESC Insight team were not alone in predicting and forecasting this hurricane for months. It’s a rare occurrence to get a hurricane of a competitive song in the Contest, but those predictions turned out to be spot on. You can’t now go and complain about being surprised about the impact of said hurricane after all those warnings.

It is all well and good debating the balance of power between jury and televote at the Eurovision Song Contest, but let’s do so remembering how freakishly rare, yet well predicted, these circumstances were last year.

When Thor’s Hammer hits the table, take some time to think about everything that has happened since 2016 with this system.

Don’t overreact to  Liverpool’s unique result.