The Jury Effect

Eurovision

Over two months after the 2009 competition, the EBU revealed both the jury and televote results separately. I wasn't paying attention at the time, but with the next Eurovision a month away I became curious as to how differently the jury and the viewers voted. The following is a list of the difference in points each country got.

Country	Televote	Jury	Difference
Azerbaijan	253	112	141
Turkey	203	114	89
Norway	378	312	66
Greece	151	93	58
Albania	81	26	55
Russia	118	67	51
Armenia	111	71	40
Bosnia	124	90	34
Romania	64	31	33
Sweden	59	27	32
Spain	38	9	29
Finland	30	12	18
Lithuania	38	31	7
Estonia	129	124	5
Ukraine	70	68	2
Croatia	55	58	-3
Portugal	45	64	-19
Moldova	66	93	-27
Germany	18	73	-55
Malta	18	87	-69
Denmark	40	120	-80
Iceland	173	260	-87
Israel	15	107	-92
France	54	164	-110
United Kingdom	105	223	-118

Despite the relatively wide gap in the number of points, Norway did incredibly well with both the viewers and the jury. Oddly enough, Norway's final score was higher than both it's televote and jury vote score, 387. This happened because it was one of the few entries that both the viewers and juries agreed on, so its average score was higher than the average score of most other entries, and it was whatever country that had the highest average that got the coveted 12 points.

While the biggest gap is over Azerbaijan's entry, the difference over Israel's entry is probably the starkest. It got a respectable 9th place finish among the juries, but the viewers totally dismissed it, leaving it in last place.

As the only finish that really matters in Eurovision is who comes in first, it appears that jury voting had little impact other than making the UK, France, and Germany feel better about themselves and ensuring that the entries for this year will be bland and boring.