Media, art and language triangle: The impact of common culture on voting behavior in eurovision song contest (1998-2016)

This study will handle the Eurovision Song Contest, the largest television program, a product of over 60 years of traditional history and popular culture. The Eurovision Song Contest is the longest running program in television history since 1956 with the participation of active members of the European Broadcasting Union. As a media product, this competition is organizing every year and following by approximately 400-600 million people all around world. The contest is not only watching by the European continent, also by the audience of non-European countries such as Canada, Brazil and Japan. Eurovision is not only a music and art competition, as the participants take on the national identity of the country they represent along with their own identity. Accordingly, many factors affect the voting behaviour in the song competition. Since 1998, the voting system has been changed from national juries to tele-voting, which allowed the audience to support their favourite competitors by sending votes from the phone. Therefore, especially in the Eurovision Song Contest from 1998, the period after the transition to the tele-voting system, which enabled the voting system to be changed, was taken into consideration. In this period, the effects of the factors such as language, media, art, etc. on the voting behaviour of the common culture were examined. It has been observed that research time countries hold each other's sides in terms of geographical neighbourhood, history or linguistic proximity. The results also show that there are political effects on the votes. In the light of the findings obtained, some solutions and suggestions about more fair voting systems were presented in the research.