http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Melodifestivalen_2013 <\/a><\/p>\nThere are six big picture instances where the Swedish people were able to call in and express their vote. These six times are the four main rounds, the second chance round, and part of the final. I mentioned that part of the final was points from international juries. In fact, there are 11 international juries: Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Iceland, Malta, the Ukraine, Israel, France, the UK, Croatia, and Germany. <\/p>\n
Because only a certain portion of contestants move on to the final (and because there is no distinction before the final between first and second, or between third and forth) there’s actually not much variance in scoring from those first few rounds. The most useful information comes from the final – 11 international juries and the Swedish people rate each of the 10 final contestants. <\/p>\n
What can we learn from this? Well, what I started thinking about was finding which countries scored the contestants in similar ways. After a little more thinking I got to wondering if we could treat each country as a item by which each contestant is measured. In such a case we could examine how well each country was measuring the same thing through a reliability analysis. <\/p>\n
Now, I recognize that this is not without pitfalls – the fact that this is rank data means first that cases aren’t independent. It also means that reliability based on continuous measurements might not be the most applicable, but I’m going to look the other way for now. <\/p>\n
A straight-up reliability analysis of the 11 country votes and the final Swedish phone vote gives us some numbers that are almost respectable – including a Cronbach’s alpha of .695. If this is a means of gathering consensus, though, which countries are simply coming out of left field?<\/p>\n
We can take a look at the inter-item and item-total correlations, and what we find is that the UK seems to be the country acting the most strange (this is also backed up by individual item-total(ish) Spearman’s rho rank order correlation for the UK). The inter-item total correlation for the UK is actually negative (-.11), implying that they are measuring something reasonably different than the rest of the countries.<\/p>\n
So what happens if we pretend that the UK forgot to show up last weekend?<\/p>\n
First off, our Cronbach’s alpha jumps up to .734.<\/p>\n
Here are the rankings and point totals as they played out in reality:<\/p>\n
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