Conservative and liberal bloggers
Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues have some interesting research,1 which I’ve blogged about before, on linking patterns and partisanship in the blogosphere. Among the other data they report is some that suggests that conservatives are more likely to respond substantively to liberals than vice-versa.
Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. …Posts that concretely address the content of a blog entry from an ideological opponent represent about a quarter (26%) of all conservative and about one fifth (21%) of all liberal posts with cross-ideological links. Substantive disagreement accounted for 12% of links from conservative to liberal blogs and 16% of links from liberals to conservatives, while substantive agreement accounted for 14% of links from conservatives to liberals and 5% of pointers from liberals to conservatives.
On the assumption that this captures a broader phenomenon, what could explain this behaviour? Four possible quick-and-dirty explanations come to my mind (readers may have others, or more sophisticated variants of the ones I present).
- The quick conservative explanation. Conservatives are more committed to norms of fair exchange than liberals are, and more likely to respond substantively to arguments from the other side. So there.
- The quick liberal explanation. The conservative movement is so intellectually corrupt that it doesn’t have any arguments that are worth taking seriously, and therefore smart left-of-center bloggers don’t usually bother. So there.
- The structural power explanation. Hargittai et al. did their research in a period when liberal blogs had come to dominate the blogosphere in terms of perceived clout, readership etc. Therefore conservatives, as a dominated fraction, had better reason to take liberals seriously than vice-versa so as to to maintain their position, try to encourage liberals to link to them etc.
- The organizational differences explanation. Many of the surveyed major liberal blogs perceive themselves as being part of an organized political movement, the ‘netroots,’ while most major conservative blogs do not (there is no good equivalent to the netroots on the right). Many liberal bloggers are thus less interested in abstract debate than in effective political action, which requires movement-building, attacking the other side etc.
In a sense, these are less explanations than pre-explanations - the sort of things that drift through your mind as you try to figure out whether any of them can be supported with empirical evidence. It’s also worth noting that they are not mutually exclusive - even the quick conservative and quick liberal explanations could be made compatible with each other with a bit of tweaking. For what it’s worth though, my first estimation guess is that the fourth of the explanations listed above is the most important. There is clear (if non-systematic) evidence of important differences between how left and right bloggers organize and perceive themselves. There also is some reason to believe that this has implications for practices of linking and argumentation.
See, for example, this article on troll rating from the Daily Kos’s dKospedia.
the line between disagreement and trolling often isn’t an easy one to define. … This site is primarily a Democratic site, with a heavy emphasis on progressive politics. It is not intended for Republicans, or conservatives. … This is not a site to debate conservative talking points. There are other sites for that. This is not a site for conservatives and progressives to meet and discuss their differences. There are other sites for that, too. … Conservative debaters are not welcome simply because the efforts here are to define and build a progressive infrastructure, and conservatives can’t help with that. There is, yes, the danger of the echo chamber, but a bigger danger is becoming simply a corner bar where everything is debated, nothing is decided, and the argument is considered the goal. The argument, however, is not the goal, here. This is an explicitly partisan site: the goal is an actual infrastructure, and actual results.
This lays out some of the reasons why we might expect sites like the Daily Kos (still the most important liberal blog community out there) not only to ban conservatives from commenting, but also not to want to engage in substantive, reasoned debate with conservative bloggers elsewhere. They perceive their role as building an organization, not as trying to create some kind of Habermasian ideal speech situation. And to the extent that this is true, their contact with people of opposing viewpoints is not intended to reach a mutually agreeable settlement, or to politely exchange views, but to win. There’s room for debating whether or not this is a good thing in normative terms (Cass Sunstein, for example, argues that it’s a bad thing; I hope to be debating him on this stuff soon), but it very likely plays an important role in explaining the differences that Eszter and her colleagues have found.
1 Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane, “Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers,” Public Choice 134, 1-2:67-86.
Comments
Nonsense!
In my experience, 100% of emails, blog posts, and comments coming from “conservative” activists uses one of the techniques of persuasion that have nothing to do with reasoned discussion. Strawman usage is just one of those techniques.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Posted by: Carolyn Kay | February 7, 2008 04:43 AM
It seems to me that 1 & 4 are different views of the same thing: 4 explains the structural reason for the difference in behavior observed in 1.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | February 7, 2008 02:09 PM
re: #3: It’s not just conditions in the blogosphere that matter. Conservatives may be coninuing in habits of debate they acquired from years of being the dominant fraction in academic and media environments.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | February 7, 2008 02:16 PM
darn.
“dominated” fraction.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | February 7, 2008 02:17 PM
Well, today a conservative blog linked to my blog, but I’m pretty sure the reverse will never happen:
http://politicalbyline.blogspot.com/2008/02/msnbc-shuster-suck-up-to-billary-for.html
Cass Sunstein can bite me. Life is too short to engage people like that.
Posted by: nonamepls | February 8, 2008 05:41 PM
I have not read the article but I just stumbled upon this. Of interest to Eszter and colleagues, perhaps?
http://voson.anu.edu.au/papers/polblogs.pdf
Posted by: Fr. | February 8, 2008 07:03 PM
I agree w/the writer at least as to Daily Kos.It represents the permanent campaign.It clearly is a movement and not a discussion forum for people of all political persuasions.As someone who has participated in numerous campaigns,we never let anyone join us who was not committed to the candidate’s cause.Kos is no different,nor should it be given its express purpose.
Posted by: tom | February 10, 2008 01:50 PM
There was time, not so long ago, when there was no such thing as a “blog.” Or much of an “internet” when you get right down to it. So the presentation of the arguments of the right and the left fell to the op-ed pages of these things we called “newspapers.” Back in those primitive days, I would routinely read the op-ed pieces of the conservatives, in an attempt to understand their arguments. I found out they did not have any arguments to understand. By and large, they simply restated the right wing talking points, using them and their own prejudices to reinforce each other.
It was remarkably similar to the sort of reasoning in the Witch Scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
The only writer who presented information in support of his conclusions — who genuinely wrote to persuade all readers — was Kevin Phillips. It is probably not a coincidence that Mr. Phillips has denounced much of what passes for “conservatism” these days.
All of this is a roundabout way of suggesting that if liberal blogs don’t link to conservatives, it is not due to a bias against their viewpoint. Rather, it is because there is not much to be gained by debating nonsense and invective.
Hey, we hardly ever link to the Flying Spaghetti Monster website either.
Posted by: Roddy McCorley | February 10, 2008 02:37 PM
Perhaps a more generous way to phrase #2 would be that conservatism is by-definition reactive to anything that moves them further from their desired state of equilibrium and therefore more inclined to monitor, and then bleat about, sites they perceive as threats to that equilibrium.
Ok, not much more generous. But then outside of blogging how generous with substantive engagement have they since, say, Eisenhower left office?
figleaf
Posted by: figleaf | February 10, 2008 03:03 PM
I have a hunch that deep down in the recesses of their depraved souls, many of the people who post at sites like LGF and redstate worry that they might be completely wrong, whereas liberal bloggers are rarely burdened with such faint misgivings.
Posted by: crimercrock lane | February 10, 2008 04:12 PM
I am willing to wager a metric shit-ton that these patterns of linkage and use shift a great deal depending on the current moods of the blogosphere and external events.
Like, if this study was done during the ugly times right before the Iraq war, i bet liberal blogs would have been linking to conservative ones going “no, i dunno, here’s what I think” and the conservative response would have been something like “Suck it, libtard”
For the most part, I read blogs where any conservative input (mostly screenshots of freeper comment threads) is presented with minimal comment beyond “look at how weird these people are”.
Then, there’s economics blogs, where it’s not a conventional partisan spat so much as a constant race to the bottom to see who can be the most obtuse, cluelessly pedantic glibritarian.
Posted by: Indy | February 10, 2008 07:16 PM
5) Conservative blogs use the same narrative as mainstream media conservatives and are indistinguishable from them. Liberal blogs spend a considerable amount of time addressing conservative media, and not the pale imitators on the webs.
Posted by: Nazgul35 | February 10, 2008 09:41 PM
I disagree with respect to DailyKos; while it’s its right to ban conservatives with whatever message it wants, I believe that actual debate is more important. I read RedState occasionally, and I have the same problem there because I can’t really respond to their I think faulty arguments.
The problem is that if you stick to reading only conservative-banning blogs, it DOES become an echo chamber, and the very reasoned arguments from the other side never gain any traction even when they’re plausible, serious arguments. We tend to forget that, for example, some of economics actually works, that corporations are actually important participants in our economy, that getting out of Iraq NOW to prevent a few American soldier deaths will cause major problems to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who depend on the Americans for protection, that there ARE some major disagreements about global warming, and so on. As a result, we end up taking the Democratic position rather than the correct position.
We assume that because of some serious flaws with the most popular Republican talking points, there is no real rhyme nor reason to what conservatives do, that it’s all done in bad faith, and so on. This is in fact true for a lot of things, especially the power grabs by Bush and the rending of our Constitution. We rather understand the neocon position of global domination by the US and we reject that (well, the more Progressive of us). We rightfully excoriate the theocons for being idiots in just about everything. But we shouldn’t forget that there IS a class of thoughtful conservatives, who embrace queers (used in the positive sense, of course), who believe in evolution and science in general, and so on, and who have reasonable arguments with real meat to them that are worth debating on Progressive sites.
Trouble is, that class is vanishingly small…
Posted by: Mauro | February 10, 2008 10:12 PM
You’ve missed something quite obvious: the math. Perhaps liberals are more internet savvy than their conservative counterparts, but there are several reasons I perceive that links are mostly unidirectional.
1) Money. Each visit to a website supported by ads results in money made by that website. Thus, if a large site links to a smaller site, then that smaller site will have an increase in ad revenue. Linking to said site increases its funding which, on the internet, equals longevity.
2) Hits. Similar to #3, the more hits a website gets, the more popular it gets, the higher it’s rank in a Google search, the more money (see #1) it brings in, the more power it gets. continuous links to a website legitimises it as a companion or a rival.
Posted by: BiePandundit | February 10, 2008 11:31 PM
figleaf:
Perhaps a more generous way to phrase #2 would be that conservatism is by-definition reactive to anything that moves them further from their desired state of equilibrium and therefore more inclined to monitor, and then bleat about, sites they perceive as threats to that equilibrium.
Ok, not much more generous.
Actually, aside from the term “bleat” it’s a pretty fair description of those see themselves as “Standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!’”
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | February 11, 2008 07:59 AM