This repository stores the code base for a research project published in Royal Society Open Science journal with the title

Breaking the code: Multi-level learning in the Eurovision Song Contests

Luis A. Nunes Amaral, Arthur Capozzi, and Dirk Helbing.

Summary of results:

Organizations learn from market, political, and societal responses to their actions. While in some cases both the actions and responses take place in an open manner, in many others, some aspects may be hidden from external observers. The Eurovision Song Contest offers a mostly open-data case in which to study learning at the levels of organizers and participants. We present here evidence for changes in the rules of the Contest in response to undesired outcomes, such as runaway winners. We also find strong evidence of participant learning the characteristics of competing songs over the 70-years of the Contest. English has been adopted as the lingua franca of the competing songs and pop has become the standard genre. The number of words of lyrics has also grown in response to this collective learning. Remarkably, we find evidence that France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain have chosen to ignore the ‘lesson’ that English lyrics increase winning probability, consistent with utility functions that award greater value to featuring national culture than to winning the Contest. These countries — but not Germany — appear to be less susceptible to Anglo-Saxon cultural influence than their peers, a resistance that may extend beyond cultural matters.