A new way to aggregate preferences: Application to eurovision song contests

Abstract

Voting systems have a great impact on the results of contests or elections. Simple methods are actually used, whereas they do not provide most accurate results. For example, in the Eurovision Song Contest, the winner may not be the most preferred candidate. Condorcet criterion, which consists in preserving most of the individual votes in the final ranking, seems intuitively the most relevant. In this paper, we propose a new ranking method founded on Condorcet voting count principle which minimizes the number of pairwise inversions of the individual preferences. We propose a two-step method: computing the cycles among vote preferences and removing a minimal set of pairwise preferences to erase all the cycles and turn the votes into a partial order as close as possible to a total order. Finally, we evaluate the impact of our ranking procedure on the last 30 Eurovision Song Contests. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.