  The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual musical competition held among
active members of the European Broadcasting Union since 1956. The event is
televised live across Europe. Each participating country presents a song and
receive a vote based on a combination of tele-voting and jury. Over the years,
this has led to speculations of tactical voting, discriminating against some
participants and thus inducing bias in the final results. In this paper we
investigate the presence of positive or negative bias (which may roughly
indicate favouritisms or discrimination) in the votes based on geographical
proximity, migration and cultural characteristics of the participating
countries through a Bayesian hierarchical model. Our analysis found no evidence
of negative bias, although mild positive bias does seem to emerge
systematically, linking voters to performers.
