To my knowledge, nobody has done a statistical study of Worldcon membership figures and distribution of nominees.
There are some common assumptions that holding a Worldcon in country X is apt to lead to more nominees from country X -- it's obviously not working this year! I have some small hope that the Japanese attending Nippon 2007 will see the Hugo Awards for the first time and will understand that they can have an impact on this and will thus use their right to nominate next year. But it's a small hope. I fear the Hugo Award may be perceived as an American award (or at best, an English-language-only award) for which Japanese works are ineligible.
There are only around 500 people nominating. I think (but have no way of proving) that a significant proportion of those 500 are long-term voters who join and vote every year. Most of them are probably Americans.
While nominations are normally biased toward American works, there are other reasons than nationalism to explain it. That is, I don't think there are many Americans who look at their ballot and say, "I shouldn't nominate work X because it's British" or something like that. However, with most of the electorate being in the USA, there's a strong bias against nominating things that the Americans are unlikely to have seen. That's why we adopted the blanket-eligibility-extension rule a few years ago.
The blanket rule must be renewed annually. It was not renewed in 2005, but was renewed in 2006, so this year, works receiving first US publication got a fresh year of eligibility if they'd been previously published elsewhere.
I think language and country of publication were the biggest barrier here. Few works are going to make the ballot unless a lot of Americans notice and like them.
I think nationality might actually have more of an affect on the final ballot, as the voters in the host country are more apt to vote for works which they've seen. Here the eligibility-extension rule works highly in favor of the non-US works, incidentally. But nominations require Americans to see the works and nominate them.
Re: Question
There are some common assumptions that holding a Worldcon in country X is apt to lead to more nominees from country X -- it's obviously not working this year! I have some small hope that the Japanese attending Nippon 2007 will see the Hugo Awards for the first time and will understand that they can have an impact on this and will thus use their right to nominate next year. But it's a small hope. I fear the Hugo Award may be perceived as an American award (or at best, an English-language-only award) for which Japanese works are ineligible.
There are only around 500 people nominating. I think (but have no way of proving) that a significant proportion of those 500 are long-term voters who join and vote every year. Most of them are probably Americans.
While nominations are normally biased toward American works, there are other reasons than nationalism to explain it. That is, I don't think there are many Americans who look at their ballot and say, "I shouldn't nominate work X because it's British" or something like that. However, with most of the electorate being in the USA, there's a strong bias against nominating things that the Americans are unlikely to have seen. That's why we adopted the blanket-eligibility-extension rule a few years ago.
The blanket rule must be renewed annually. It was not renewed in 2005, but was renewed in 2006, so this year, works receiving first US publication got a fresh year of eligibility if they'd been previously published elsewhere.
I think language and country of publication were the biggest barrier here. Few works are going to make the ballot unless a lot of Americans notice and like them.
I think nationality might actually have more of an affect on the final ballot, as the voters in the host country are more apt to vote for works which they've seen. Here the eligibility-extension rule works highly in favor of the non-US works, incidentally. But nominations require Americans to see the works and nominate them.