Political Blogs: Transmission Belts, Soapboxes, Mobilizers, or Conversation Starters?

ABSTRACT

This paper makes an initial attempt to situate political blogging alongside other forms of political participation by asking the question: how do political bloggers actually use their blogs? More specifically, this paper relies on a detailed content analysis of 5,000 less popular and 5,000 A‐list political blog posts over the course of the 2004 campaign in order to determine whether political bloggers use their blogs primarily as “soapboxes,” “transmission belts,” “mobilizers,” or “conversation starters.” The results presented here suggest that although political blogs are used to make opinion statements far more often than they are used to mobilize political action, to request feedback from readers, or to pass along information produced by others, blog use changes significantly in response to key political events. To be more precise, less popular political bloggers were significantly more likely to mobilize political action on Election Day, and all bloggers—regardless of popularity—showed a greater propensity to seek feedback from their readers on the days of the presidential debates and in the weeks immediately following the election. Political blogging, in short, is a complex form of political participation that blends hypertext links, opinionated commentary, calls to political action, and requests for feedback in different ways at different moments in time.

KEYWORDS:

• Blogs
• political participation
• mobilization
• 2004 election

Acknowledgments

Kevin Wallsten is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs. The author would like to thank Laura Stoker, Tatishe Nteta, Jill Greenlee, Rachel Van Sickle-Ward, Jack Citrin, Antoinette Pole, and the anonymous reviewers for comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes

1. The data are available from the author upon request. In addition, it will be available for download on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's Web site (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu) beginning in November 2007.

2. The growth in the number of blogs listed on the Eatonweb Portal closely mimics the growth of the number of blogs overall.

3. As McKenna (2007) points out, political blogs may account for a greater percentage of the total number of blogs if the definition of political blogs is expanded to include blogs that mix personal and political content.

4. As suggested above, a longitudinal design, no matter how short the period, is better suited for answering questions about how political blogs are actually used than the cross-sectional designs employed in previous research. More generally, the five-month period covered in this study is quite long relative to other studies of blogging. The longest studies on political blog content to date have been Adamic and Glance's (2005) analysis of linkage patterns on political blogs, which covered a two month period, and Cornfield et al.'s (2005) study of blogger-generated “buzz,” which covered a three month period.

5. Some scholars have argued that a lack of external editing is a defining feature of blogs. Most notably, Drezner and Farrell (2004a) define a Weblog (blog) as “a web page with minimal to no external editing, providing online commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources” (p. 2).

6. The 12 directories were: Blogwise (http://www.blogwise.com), Blogarama (http://www.blogarama.com), BlogCatalog (http://www.blogcatalog.com), BlogUniverse (http://www.bloguniverse.com), BlogSearchEngine (http://www.blogcatalog.com), BlogStreet, CampaignLine (http://www.campaignline.com), ETalkingHead (http://www.etalkinghead.com), GetBlogs (http://www.getblogs.com), EatonwebPortal, Globe of Blogs (http://www.globeofblogs.com), and Yahoo's directory of blogs (http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/Politics/News_and_Media/Blogs).

7. This is similar to the approach used by Adamic and Glance (2005). More specifically, they create a sample of 1000 political blogs by downloading the listings of political blogs from several online blog directories, including eTalkingHead, BlogCatalog, CampaignLine, and Blogarama.

8. In addition, blogs that were included in the A-list population were excluded from the final population list of less popular political blogs.

9. In order to determine the location of a blog's author, three steps were taken. First, many blogs include a location heading in their sidebar that mentions the city and country where the blogger resides. If a blog included a location heading that mentioned a country that was not the United States, it was not included in the sample. Second, many blogs include links to the blogger's profile that mention where the blogger lives. If a blog included a link to a profile that mentioned the blogger lived in a country that was not the United States, it was not included in the sample. Finally, I checked the text of the blog itself for mentions of the blogger's place of residence. If the blogger mentioned living in a place that was not the United States, the blog was not included in the sample.

10. A list of the less popular blogs included in the final sample is available upon request.

11. The Truth Laid Bear Ecotraffic uses statistics from Sitemeter (a software program that measures the number of hits a site receives) in determining how much traffic a blog receives. Unfortunately, not all bloggers use Sitemeter and, as a result, rankings based on the number of hits are often incomplete.

12. This approach is the one used by McKenna and Pole (2004) in their study of A-list political bloggers.

13. I employed a broad definition of political, and only blogs that were devoted solely to the arts, literature, or technological issues were excluded.

14. The three blogs that did not discuss political issues were Geek and Proud (http://www.geekandproud.net),” Kottke (http://www.kottke.org), and Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org). Where is Raed? (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com) was the blog not written by an author in the United States.

15. Many of the blogs that were categorized as “no clear ideological position” had multiple authors that contradicted or challenged each other.

16. Although the number of blogs included in the sample of A-list blogs (16) is fairly small in statistical terms, it is very similar to previous research on how political blogs are used. McKenna (2007), for example, interviewed 9 bloggers in her study of policy blogging and McKenna and Pole (2004) surveyed 28 respondents in their study of A-list bloggers.

17. In addition, there were 25 blogs that could not be coded for ideology. Most of these blogs were very short and, as a result, contained very little information on which to base a classification of ideology. Indeed, some of these blogs contained only a few posts and made no reference to politics.

18. Another possibility is that the specific blog directories used here are somehow unattractive to conservative bloggers and, as a result, the population list from which the sample was drawn under represents conservative blogs.

19. Blog posts cannot be classified as both “link or quote only” and “feedback” because a “link or quote” requires that the blogger provides no additional commentary about the link or quote that is provided, and “feedback” requires the blogger to explicitly ask his or her audience for feedback on some issue.

20. The category “mobilize through link or quote” refers to posts that attempt to mobilize political action but that do so only by providing information produced by some other source. Because this category requires that the information presented is produced by another source, this category is distinct from the category “mobilize only,” which contains posts where the blogger attempts to mobilize action in his or her own words but does not provide commentary.

21. There were no posts placed in Categories 8 and 9 and, as a result, no examples are provided.

22. These numbers are taken from ActBlue (http://www.actblue.com) – the online political fundraising site used by Daily Kos and Eschaton.

23. During the period of this study (July 1, 2004 to November 31, 2004), however, the Daily Kos was not significantly more popular than the other blogs included in this sample. Indeed, as measured by hits and incoming links, the Daily Kos was very similar in popularity to other A-list political blogs.

24. Studying the way that the Daily Kos is used presents a number of methodological problems that do not exist in the study of other blogs. Most importantly because it is a “hive blog” that allows some members to post on the blog's front page and allows others to submit “diaries” that are posted on other pages of the blog, analyses of the Daily Kos must determine those blog entries to include in the study and which to ignore.