A fresh look at the left and right political blogospheres

Completely frivolous comment, but I was completely misled by the still-to-me-weird use of blue for left and red for right.

twenty years now?

Ten years, according to Wikipedia, which adds, “This unofficial system of political colors used in the United States is the reverse of that in most other long-established democracies”, hence harry b’s confusion.

Eszter herself has done work on this – see “here”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/p7m41t21344130t7/fulltext.pdf.

Maybe red meant crazy radical and it’s now true.

does this new study do anything to distinguish respectful links from point-and-laugh links?

i mean—to say that balloon-juice links to the nro corner (as an instance) is not to say that there is any degree of ideological affiliation between them, or even that there is any dialogue in the sense of discussion likely to moderate or synthesize the views of the participants. john or dougj just link to some stupid shit that some cornerite has said, says “can you believe the stupid shit these cornerites say?”, and that’s as far as it goes.

On a more abstract note, how do you measure “degree of ideological affiliation”? I think this is the real $64,000 question. I’m not a regular reader, but I will at least look at links to Marginal Revolution or Volokh Conspiracy because they make at a minimum make a pretense of scientific inquiry and will acknowledge the validity of, say, the theory of evolution. But there are other sites that on the surface appear to have the same ideological bent (at least, in terms of policy prescriptives on specific issues) which I will not touch with the metaphorical ten-foot pole. Heck, there are sites whose general opinions are much more in accord with mine that I will not patronize because of their anti-science, anti-reality stance (to my mind, they equate to much the same thing.) For example, any site that actively promotes the belief that vaccination causes autism is one that I don’t care to read, no matter how much they diss torture or the expansion of executive power under Obama.

To Laura’s point, the study suggests that the practices, habits and infrastructure developed by the liberal blogosphere and netroots helped pave the way for Obama’s success. It does not argue that bloggers actively coordinated with the campaign or were enthused about Obama during the primaries. (Most weren’t, to be sure.)

Here’s how I describe it my article today discussing the findings:

The study proposes a historical theory for the Democrats’ current edge online. (It’s a big one, as the 2008 election revealed, when Obama raised $500 million through the web alone. McCain raised under $200 million from all individual donors combined.)
According to the authors, the netroots’ early embrace of deeper participation platforms, coupled with progressive bloggers interest in mobilizing fundraising and specific actions, helped prime the tactics and habits that supported the Democrats’ later web dominance.

The survey data does show that progressive bloggers were far more demanding of their readers. One out of three liberal sites made direct fundraising pitches, and almost half asked readers to take some political action, according to a section of the study analyzing the top sixty-five blogs. On the right, however, only one out of twenty blogs pushed fundraising, and fewer than one out of five issued “calls to action.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100510/melber

Digression: Benkler is interviewed by Russ Roberts in an interesting podcast on internet policy issues. Benkler is massively smart and, at least to an outsider, exceptionally well-informed. The interplay between them is also interesting, in that Roberts tries to argue for markets-only solutions on first principles, to which Benkler responds that you actually need to look at the evidence to know what to do. Yes.

First of all, the Netroots wanted nothing to do with Obama. They were actually annoyed that his campaign never reached out to them.

This really isn’t true. There certainly were a range of responses to Obama during the campaign in the “left” blogosphere, and some sites (most notably MyDD) were quite hostile. But DailyKos (which is usually seen as the center of the “Netroots”) was a distinctly pro-Obama site during the primaries. So much so that there was an organized stomp-off of Hillary Clinton supporters during the middle of the 2008 primary campaign.

Red/blue in the US is quite recent, and I don’t think it has any particular symbolism.

The TV networks like to use bright primary colors for their electoral votes maps on presidential election nights. They used to switch every so often — nothing so systematic as winner/loser or incumbent/challenger.

In the 2000 election everyone was staring at these maps for weeks. It just so happened that that year most networks had been using red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. Everyone else pretty quickly converged on it, and people started using “red” and “blue” as shorthand, and it stuck. Purely contingent, as far as I can tell.

Back on the point of the original post, and stripping away some of the sublime and funky language, I don’t know how exciting or interesting it is to hear that there is some left/right contact in US political blogs, that some of it includes substantive argument (“deliberation”), or even that left-blogs tend to arrange for more access (“affordances”), and mobilization. Isn’t that all sort of obvious? As a non-specialist reader, this looks to me more like a case of taking the statistically low-hanging fruit and then claiming interesting discoveries.

Deliberation, access, mobilization: but on the basis of what actual information and understanding? The invasion of Iraq was facilitated by a considerable level of generally-accepted pig-ignorance, was it not; and the GWOT or whatever it is being called now, is clearly fueled by a considerable level of what you could generically or politely call xenophobia. To put it another way, there is a very dramatic failure to “deliberate” or “pay respectful attention to” the views of certain non-American, non-European people and groups, particularly cases where America is waging, or perhaps threatening to wage, war in their countries, but not only in those cases. The internet, as it happens, provides abundant resources of fighting against this kind of narrowness of view, with news and information available in many languages from many points of view, readable in all kinds of scripts, and even an astonishing level of usable machine-translation. The internet can remind us that it is a big world, and help us understand it. Hasn’t “social science” of the type reported on here shown itself to be sort of irrelevant in this context, perhaps inevitably because of the kind of “science” that it is?

@20: It’s funny that you mention technological change over time — I thought one of the most notable omissions of the paper was any mention of Internet discourse *before* blogs, and in particular, USENET. The way those authors write you’d think they thought blogs sprung full-grown from the head of Jupiter — and if they actually do think that, doesn’t that lack of perspective cast some doubt on their conclusions?

The old Internet culture, IMO, depended to a significant extent on the type of people who built the early Internet and spent a lot of time on it — i.e., academics and geeks. Bringing in more mainstream users is changing that, and I would have liked to see more discussion of that. But maybe it was beyond the scope of their paper — you can’t answer all questions at once, after all.

@19: To a certain extent, I guess it’s easy to respond to “right blogs are more comfortable with top-down centralized control structures” with a gigantic “duh”, but there’s a long scholarly tradition that intuition is no substitute for rigorous study, because of an even longer tradition of failures of intuition. So it’s still worth something to see this thesis confirmed, even if it accords with what most people were probably suspecting all along.

Link to the PDF doesn’t work…