Eurovision | TOP 52 Messiest Countries (1956-2025) by Standard Deviation

Welcome back to another video! In the last one we looked at the average, but what if we used the other common statistical measurement, standard deviation? STANDARD DEVIATION Standard deviation measures how much data is spread out from the average- a low standard deviation means more consistency, while a high standard deviation means more variation (you can Google the formula). The bottom countries in the list received very similar results in all their participations, then we gradually move up to the top countries who managed to achieve the most varied results of all. So what has the standard deviation been applied to? Every country's set of results has been converted into percentages based on their placement in each contest (this video explains everything    • Eurovision | TOP 50 Countries by Average R...  ) as a way of comparing between contests with different amounts of countries fairly. Imagine 2 countries, both with 2 participations. Country A has a win and a last place, while Country B placed in the middle of the scoreboard twice. The average percentile of both of these countries would be 50%, but the standard deviation would be much higher for country A as they achieved the most inconsistent results! (Standard deviation usually isn't expressed as a percentage, but it is in this video simply because it's what the data being dealt with here is measured in). For the statisticians present, I have used the formula for populations (rather than samples) as it's being calculated across each country's entire set of results. I only just found it out while making this video, but the =STDEV function on spreadsheets actually calculates the sample version by default which leads to slightly different results, so I had to change it to =STDEVP for a fully accurate ranking. HOW THE SONGS WERE CHOSEN I've been wanting to do this video for years but was never really sure what to put for the songs (since the most average result is already taken) until now! Even still, it's more the ranking that's the focus of the video- it just happens to need songs playing too, so I chose a method that somewhat signifies varied results: 1. Each country's placement was converted to a percentile, and ordered from best to worst result 2. The gap in percentage between each entry was calculated 3. I found the biggest of these gaps and chose the song above this For example, Yugoslavia's 1989 winner has a percentile of 100%, and a gap of 14.29% over the 2nd best Yugoslav result in 1987 (4th of 22, 85.71%). In the entire list of Yugoslav results, 14.29% is the biggest gap, so 1989 is the song that is shown. Join the ESC Clarinet Moon discord server here:   / discord