Analysis: Pollster Kevin Cunningham explains how the nature of Eurovision voting influenced the outcome
As is always the case with Eurovision, the voting was interesting. While Ireland's jury vote gave 12 points to Switzerland (the winning song of the contest), 10 points to Sweden and none to Israel, the vote from the Irish public gave 12 points to Croatia and 10 to Israel.
Why was the public vote so different? At a time of mass public and political outrage at Israel's actions in Gaza, why did the public award 10 points to their song? Dr Kevin Cunningham is a lecturer in politics at TU Dublin and the founder of the Ireland Thinks polling company. He joined the Morning Ireland team on RTÉ Radio 1 to talk through the nature of Eurovision voting and how this influenced the outcome.
Cunningham talked about a recent Ireland Thinks poll about public sentiment to Israel and Palestine. "It showed that when people were asked which side did they sympathise with, 67% said the Palestinian side, and 7% said the Israeli side, with the remainder undecided or otherwise. So it did seem quite surprising that Israel got such a high support in terms of coming second".
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There are two principal reasons why this sort of thing can happen and it comes down to the nature of the way in which the voting actually happens. First, it's a problem of 'diffuse alternatives', explains Cunningham. "If Israel were on the ballot, let's say, and that was the principal thing people were voting on, there's only one Israeli option and 24 other non-Israel options. So that means that the relative concentration of support within the Israeli option tends to be a little bit higher."
So what vote share would we expect Israel to have gotten to get to second place? "If we look at the result from previous years' Eurovision finals, the second place got around 13 or 14% in the last two years, so we might expect that it only takes 13 or 14% for someone to actually get to 2nd place. That means that quite a large proportion might actually have been voting for others."
Read more: All you need to know about Eurovision voting patterns
Second, we have to take into consideration 'motivated reasoning'. "We see this in politics when it comes to turnout in elections and turnout in referendums", explains Cunningham. "When we see turnout in referendums become very low we notice that the results become quite skewed. If turnout in a referendum gets lower than 35% the people who are more motivated, more interested, tend to influence the outcome a little bit more".
In the case of Eurovision, it's even more extreme. "Because we know that even of those that viewed the Eurovision, only around 6 or 7%, from previous data, actually vote", says Cunningham, "so it means that it's at the extreme end. But then what accentuates this even more is the number of times that you can vote. You can vote up to 20 times so that influences it to a massive degree in reality.
"You could imagine there are certain people who vote once or twice for a given song, and then there might be some people who vote 20 times for the exact same song or country. By definition, taken together with the low turnout and also the scale in which people might be voting, it necessitates, basically, an extreme preference for whoever tends to win, or otherwise. If you imagine a room of 100 people and 99 of them vote once, and one of them votes 20 times, based on our sums, you could expect that one to actually win."
