Political Influence of the "Blogosphere"

March 09, 2005
Political Influence of the Blogosphere
Natalie Glance, one of BlogPulse's senior researchers, has co-authored a fascinating paper that examines the degree of interaction and behavior among top conservative and liberal political bloggers during the November Presidential election, and the findings are quite revealing.

The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, written with Lada Adamic of HP Labs, examines the posts of 40 "A-list" conservative and liberal blogs in the two months leading up to the Nov. 2004 Presidential Election. The study also includes a one-day snapshot of more than 1,000 political blogs. Highlights?

• Coverage by political leaning was fairly balanced. Of 1,494 blogs that met the researchers' definition of influence, 759 were liberal and 735 were conservative.

• Even though numbers of blogs were fairly balanced, conservative blogs showed a greater tendency to link to other blogs (84% linked to other blogs, 82% received a link) compared to liberal blogs (74% linked to other blogs, 67% received a link). That behavior is captured in the following graphic from the paper, which illustrates the division between liberal (blue) and conservative (red) blogs. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, purple links from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog (indicated by a circle) reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.

• Conservative blogs also linked to more numbers of blogs (15.1 average) than did liberal blogs (13.6 average). In the single-day snapshot analysis, the most linked to liberal blog had more links (Daily Kos at 338) than the most linked to conservative blog (Instapundit at 277), although Glance and Adamic found that "the distribution of inlinks is highly uneven, with a few blogs of either persuasion having over a hundred incoming links, while hundreds of blogs have just one or two."

• Conservative blogs tended to rank higher overall than liberal blogs, with the top 20 conservative blogs falling in the 44 most-cited blogs while the top 20 liberal blogs fell in the top 77 most-cited blogs.

• Liberal and conservative bloggers also had clear preferences for mainstream news sources that they cited. Fox News (89%) and the National Review, (92%) for example, received most of their links from conservative-leaning blogs. By contrast, 91% of Salon.com's links came primarily from liberal-leaning blogs. Top right-leaning political bloggers tended to refer more frequently to the New York Post, WSJ Opinion Journal and the Washington Times, while left-leaning political bloggers linked more frequently to the Los Angeles Times, New Republic and Wall Street Journal. The New York Times, Google News and Washington Post tended to received equal numbers of links from both sides.

• Who were bloggers writing about? Curiously, 59% of the mentions of John Kerry came from right-leaning bloggers, while 53% of the mentions of George W. Bush came from left-leaning bloggers. Not surprisingly, some of the top political figures mentioned during the campaign, including CBS' Dan Rather, film maker Michael Moore, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others -- continue to be discussed as "key people" in the blogosphere today.

The current paper by Glance and Adamic bolsters BlogPulse's previous examination of bloggers' impact on the 2004 Presidential election, a special online report called Campaign Radar 2004. It and other special contributions are available in the BlogPulse Showcase section of the web site.