Voting Balance Eurovision 2014
This visualization shows the voting behaviour difference between the selected judges and the public telephone voting in Eurovision Song Contest 2014 focusing on the Austrian performance by Conchita Wurst. For instance the map above reveals that despite the extremely high popularity of Conchita Wurst in the public of Armenia (rank 2 in the televoting) the jury decided to rank Austria at 22nd place, which resulted in the combined 14th rank and no points for Austria. Digging deeper into the data you can see very similar voting behaviours repeated in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Germany, etc.
After ORF's announcement that Conchita Wurst was internally selected as the Austrian representative for the Eurovision Song Contest 2014, there were many negative reactions and disapproval. Vladimir Zhirinovsky declared the participation of Conchita as "The end of Europe." and added “Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria, we made a mistake in freeing Austria. We should have stayed.” Another Russian politician Vitaly Milonov was calling the contest a “Europe-wide gay parade” and wrote a letter to Russian committee requesting that the country should stop participating. In addition to negative reactions from Russia, the Ministry of Information in Belarus received a petition that called for Belarusian broadcaster BTRC to boycott the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, but this is forbidden by the European Broadcasting Union.
The Eurovision Song Contest is obviously a political event. Despite all the political transphobic threatening remarks, Conchita Wurst won the contest by scoring 290 points and became Austria's first Eurovision winner since 1966.
The reason we wanted to visualize the Eurovision 2014 data (especially where Austrian votes are coming from) was to see the polarity between Jury votes and Public votes in the continental scale. After mapping the data over the European map it is possible to come up with many conclusions about the competition such as the political and geographical relationships of the countries.
Dataset
| Voting Country | Jury Vote | Tele Vote | Vote Difference | Combined Rank | Given Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Albania | 6 | N/A | N/A | 6 | 5 |
| Armenia | 24 | 2 | 22 | 14 | 0 |
| Azerbaijan | 24 | 3 | 21 | 10 | 1 |
| Belarus | 23 | 4 | 19 | 14 | 0 |
| Belgium | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Denmark | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 8 |
| Estonia | 8 | 8 | 0 | 7 | 4 |
| Finland | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| France | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 10 |
| Georgia | N/A | 2 | N/A | 2 | 10 |
| Germany | 11 | 1 | 10 | 4 | 7 |
| Greece | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 12 |
| Hungary | 8 | 2 | 6 | 2 | 10 |
| Iceland | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 10 |
| Ireland | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 12 |
| Israel | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 12 |
| Italy | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 12 |
| Latvia | 10 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| Lithuania | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 10 |
| Macedonia | 14 | 5 | 9 | 8 | 3 |
| Malta | 9 | 1 | 8 | 2 | 10 |
| Moldova | 4 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 7 |
| Montenegro | 17 | 5 | 12 | 9 | 2 |
| Netherlands | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Norway | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 10 |
| Poland | 19 | 4 | 15 | 11 | 0 |
| Portugal | 6 | 1 | 5 | 1 | 12 |
| Romania | 7 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 8 |
| Russia | 11 | 3 | 8 | 6 | 5 |
| San Marino | 14 | N/A | N/A | 14 | 0 |
| Slovenia | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Spain | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Sweden | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Switzerland | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
| Ukraine | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 8 |
| United Kingdom | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 12 |
All Data from www.eurovision.tv | download CSV
Thanks to D3, Christopher Lindinger, Stephan Lohwasser & Nick Rabinowitz for the SVG