#bellwethers

Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today’s statistical maps, which are all about the concept of bellwethers and how they can apply to the ESC. A bellwether, as a voting concept, is an area where swings and trends there are a microcosm of trends across a bigger geographic area - some famous examples are Ohio in US presidential elections or Dartford in UK general elections, where, since 1964, the local party who won also won the bigger election. In the context of the ESC, a bellwether would be a country who often gives its top points to the eventual winner. The last time I looked at this, way back in 2014 before the contest of that year, Estonia was a great example of a bellwether, having given their top points to the winner 7 out of 10 times, whilst most Mediterranean countries had a record of not often giving their douze to the winner. What has changed since then? This time, I looked at the four contests between 2014 and last year, and counted the jury and televote douzes separately. I also looked to see if countries had given their douze to the country that ended top in their semi-final (or second, if they themselves ended up first.) 

When it comes to the televoters, the majority of countries that have most often voted for the eventual winner or their semi final’s winner are clustered around central Europe and the Nordic lands, with Finland, Iceland, Poland, Germany and Austria having the best records alongside the fake televote of San Marino and the one intriguing, genuine exception of Israel. It is curious how countries like Iceland and Finland have had such difficulties qualifying in recent years, given that their voters are so on trend when it comes to picking winners. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the Eurozone has televoters who have barely ever given a twelve to the eventual winner, particularly in south-eastern Europe but also in Ireland and the UK, whose televoters haven’t voted once for the winner in 8 semi-finals and finals and thus who may be considered a true anti-bellwether!

With regards to the jury vote, the bellwether countries are more distributed across the map. Israel is once again astonishingly regular in reflecting the general trends, with its juries having given their douze to the eventual winner in three out of four finals - the one exception, 2015, being when they voted for the public victors, Italy - and in three out of four semi-finals, the only miss being 2014 where they gave their douze to Romania, the semi’s runners-up. The eclectic trio of San Marino, Slovenia and Lithuania are the next strongest jury bellwethers with a 5/8 douze rate to the winners. It is interesting to note that Latvia also has a decent bellwether rate, whilst Estonia, once a dependable bellwether, has juries that have never voted for the winner once in any of the past 8 finals/semi-finals they’ve voted on. Another curiosity is how Austria and Germany have some of the strongest records of their televoters douzing the eventual winners, but their juries have only done so 1/8 times.  It’s too early to say whether these bellwethers will remain in 2018, but I’ll be paying a very close eye to the results declared by Iceland, San Marino and Israel - despite the bookies’ current odds and the amount of online hype, they may not win but could well end up voting for the eventual winner instead. A full data table is available below:

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Interest in bellwethers lift stock market index by N15 billion

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Nigerian Stock ExchaNge (NSE)

Following investors renewed appetite in some bellwether stocks, the Nigerian equities market rebounded yesterday, as market capitalization appreciated by N15 billion.

Specifically, at the close of transactions, the All -Share Index (ASI) rose by 32.11 points or 0.12 per cent to 26,397.94 points. Accordingly, investors gained N15 billion in value as…