Article: Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers, Public Choice, January 2008.
Summary: On the one hand, the internet provides people with access to an extraordinarily diverse range of information and opinions. On the other hand, the internet can also bring like-minded people together into isolated, homogeneous communities devoid of dissent and diversity. Which side wins out?
Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane look at political blogs and examine how frequently conservative bloggers link to liberal bloggers and vice versa. They followed 40 of the top political blogs (20 conservative, 20 liberal) for three week-long periods over the course of ten months. They have several interesting findings:
- In terms of blogroll links, conservatives are more likely to link to liberal blogs than liberal bloggers are to link to conservative blogs.
- Within blog posts, about 12% of outgoing links from conservative blogs went to liberal blogs, and about 16% of outgoing links from liberal blogs went to conservative blogs.
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common format of these cross-ideological links follow a “straw-man” format, simply dismissing the other sides’ views
- However, when blog posts actually engage the substance of the linked article, conservative bloggers were actually more likely to agree (14%) than disagree (12%), while liberal bloggers only expressed substantive agreement 5% of the time.
In short, they found some support for both faces of the internet, and also found some interesting differences between conservative and liberal bloggers.
If this is interesting to you, this article is part of a special issue on blogs and politics.