Abstract: When Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) first adopted the voting system in which citizens could vote by telephone, also known as televoting, it became possible for large population subgroups with similar biases to directly influence the voting outcome. As a result, region-specific voting trends emerged. In this paper, findings about ESC voting patterns based on data from the televoting period (1998–2008) are presented. Countries were partitioned into eight different regions based on their geographic, demographic, economic and cultural characteristics. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering and visualization of voting distribution using a circos plot were performed to check for the existence of inter-region and intra-region favoritism. Distinct decision tree models were built for votings of countries from different regions. Region-specific voting patterns, connected with demographic, religous, linguistic, economic and geographic relationships between the countries, were examined by analyzing structure of decision tree models. Results indicate that the intra-region favoritism exists in most of the regions, while inter-region favoritism exists between some pairs of regions. Differences in voting patterns between richer and poorer regions were noticed. Countries from richer regions tend to favor countries from which they have numerous economic immigrants, probably due to patriotic voting of these immigrants. Countries from poorer regions tend to give more points to other countries with similar demographic and cultural structure. |