How European are you?

We had some friends round for drinks and nibbles on Saturday to express our shared bewilderment at the spectacle of European pop music and sat, sang and sipped whilst scoring.

At the end of the evening I was a little disappointed at how few points the UK gave Iceland, so I was rather interested to learn that Eurovision have published all of the scores of both the expert juries of each country (and individual jurors) and the votes cast by phone or internet. Digging in the data, it transpired that the 'expert' jurors on average rated Iceland as the 15th best song, but the clearly more intelligent UK population thought it the 4th best song.

So, I wondered, which country's jury agreed with the jury of my friends?

This was a little bit of a faff for a Sunday, as there are 36 countries casting votes, so that was 36 tables to extract from 36 webpages. I wrote a little macro in Excel to automate the task and then ran a Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient test for each jury.

Interestingly, the nation we were most closely aligned was Belgium, which I'm quite satisfied with, followed by surprise surprise, Iceland (the correlation didn't include our score for Iceland as they can't vote for themselves)! Thinking about statistical significance - there's a 1% chance that it was a fluke that our tastes align with those of the Belgian experts and about 3% change with Iceland.

Despite disagreeing on Iceland, we were still however reasonably strongly correlated to the British judges. At the other end of the scale our musical tastes are not only not aligned, but actually show a negative correlation with Montenegro with a 7% probability that Montenegro aren't contrary buggers.

p
1
BE
Belgium
0.44
2
IS
Iceland
0.38
3
SM
San Marino
0.37
4
GB
United Kingdom
0.34
5
NL
The Netherlands
0.31
6
PL
Poland
0.29
7
DK
Denmark
0.29
8
FI
Finland
0.29
9
LT
Lithuania
0.26
10
CH
Switzerland
0.25
32
MK
F.Y.R. Macedonia
-0.18
33
AL
Albania
-0.23
34
UA
Ukraine
-0.26
35
MT
Malta
-0.28
36
ME
Montenegro
-0.29

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