What Theories of Political Participation Can Teach Us about the Blogosphere, and Vice Versa.

Abstract

Few venues span the spectrum of political ideas better than the blogosphere, the sprawling online network of "web-logs"' and their authors. Roughly 1.3 million Americans blog at least occasionally about politics, with aggregate daily readership exceeding that of major newspapers, and daily aggregate word counts in the tens of millions. This incredibly diverse medium captures the daily thoughts of people from all walks of life, from Senators to army wives to community activists to business owners to conspiracy theorists, all lending their voices to a public forum that was almost unimaginable a generation ago.

Previous research has focused primarily on how blogging is different, especially how blogging is different from traditional journalism. In contrast, I show how political blogging is strikingly similar--to political activism. The same social forces that lead people to vote, protest, or write letters to public officials can also lead them to blog about politics. Thus, bloggers are not journalists. They are activists, which means that classic theories of political participation can inform the study of blogging. This project explores these similarities, detailing the forces that drive participation in the political blogosphere, and revealing where the blogosphere represents--and distorts--the voice of the electorate. This research provides clues into behaviors that are hard to observe in other contexts, but matter deeply for society and for democracy.

Conversely, data from the blogosphere can open new avenues of research into political participation. Unlike most forms of communication, blogging leaves a permanent data trail. Archives of thousands of political blogs exist online, complete with text, dates, links, and comments. This project taps this wealth of social data using a combination of techniques from social and computer science: survey research, content analysis, web crawling, and automated text classification. Using this interdisciplinary mix of tools, I survey hundreds of bloggers and analyze nearly eight million blog posts. In the process, I build methodological bridges between social and computer science, making software and data available for future research.