The Monkey Cage

Good LA Times article. Great blog.

Here’s a new political blog looking at the current vacuum in new left-wing ideology, and it has several reader polls:

http://leftsolutions.wordpress.com/

I also read http://leftsolutions.wordpress.com. It is one of the 6% of blogs you found in your study that has a more polarized readership in that many commenters are libertarians and right wing conservatives who disagree with what is written there.

Jonathan: It’s not 6% of blogs. It’s 6% of blog readers who read both left- and right-wing blogs.

Check your work, professor.

CaptainsQuarters.com hasn’t existed for around 6 months. Ed Morrissey, the proprietor of that site, moved on to Michelle Malkin’s group blog HotAir.com, which is one of the most popular political blogs on the Internet.

Thanks, Brian. Michelle Malkin’s personal blog was one of the most popular blogs among the people we surveyed. HotAir.com was relatively new as of the fall of 2006, and it was not cited as frequently by our respondents. (I would need to check to see how many mentioned it.) Readers of Malkin’s personal blog illustrate the findings we discuss: they tend to be strongly conservative and quite far away, ideologically speaking, from readers of left-wing blogs such as Daily Kos.

From the piece:

To determine just how polarized blog readers are, we constructed a measure of political ideology by drawing on blog readers’ attitudes toward stem cell research, abortion, the Iraq war, the minimum wage and capital gains tax cuts. Using this measure, we then arrayed respondents from left to right. Here’s what we found. Readers of liberal blogs were clustered at the far left, and readers of conservative blogs were bunched at the far right.

So if you’re pro-choice, you think stem cell research is okay, you’re informed about the Iraq War, and you have a view on economics that didn’t come straight out of the Cato Institute, you’re necessarily “far left?”

Either you didn’t give enough information in your article, or your definition of “far left” simply means someone who has moderate views and is also well informed (You’re pro choice? And you don’t have fundamentalist views about stem cells? Holy moly! Do you also read Chairman Mao and Che Guevara?)

I think you should use care with the definition of “left wing.” As far as I can see, blog readers seem to have views that I find more convincing than yours about this subject (although, I admit, I did not see your study—I just read your op-ed.) And as for the size of the readership relative to the overall population, I don’t know if you saw Rick Pearlstein’s reply to your article.

I would bet you’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s theories, which make some sense on a theoretical level. But do you think people with “centrist” views are immune from having their own information cocoons?

JJ, thanks for your comments. By “far left” and, for that matter, “far right” we meant nothing pejorative. It is a descriptive term that merely signifies where people are located on the scale we constructed. See the bottom panel of Figure 5 in the paper.

You’ll have to say more about what is problematic with our use of “left-wing.” We use it only as a shorthand to denote blogs that tend to be “liberal” or “on the left.”

And our paper certainly speaks to Sunstein’s thesis. (He is cited in the paper, naturally.) Could a centrist also have a cocoon? Sure, if they read only centrist voices. But our evidence suggests that most blog readers are cocooning on the left or right.

Thanks for your reply, Dr. Sides. I think the problem I have is that “far left” and “left wing” is used as a pejorative term by the right—and the mainstream, for that matter. But I don’t think the left blogosphere is that far left, for reasons I mentioned above.

My sense is that the whole discourse has been pulled to the right, so that the people you describe as “left wing” are not so far to the end of the spectrum as people described as “right wing.” What comes immediately to mind is how what has been called “left wing” historically compares to what you’re calling left wing and what the modern right calls “left wing.” (I believe there are reasons for this happening having to do with the media environment over the past decade, which I think is part of the reason for the left blogosphere’s emergence.)

Bloggers may be confrontational in rhetorical style, but I think most hold views slightly to the left of Dwight Eisenhower, which is hardly “left wing” (as the commenter pointed out in the Crooked Timber post I linked to above).

Sorry I didn’t have a chance to look at your paper. I’ll have a look.

Reading that over, I’m not sure that’s clear—what I mean is that the media environment over the past 10 years has shoved out even moderate views on the left out of public discourse. (Opposition to the Iraq War is usually cited as the prime example.) The moderate becomes “left wing,” when it’s not.

Where do you go when you’re not represented in the discourse? To the internet.

One more thing about “left wing.” It’s helpful to listen to this interview with Paul Krugman, someone who has been called one of the “spiritual godfathers” of the left-leaning blogosphere, especially at about 4 minutes in.

JJ, all our analysis does is allow us to place the ideologies of readers of left- and right-wing blogs relative to each other. This does not address whether the ideological spectrum has shifted in some absolute sense, which is a different, but important, question.

I’m just saying that the common understanding of language and phrases matter, especially in a widely circulated op-ed. I could be talking about “the south” and referring to Arizona. Because technically, you could call Arizona “the south,” being that it’s south of Nevada and Utah. But that would violate the common understanding that people have of that term.

Similarly, calling Paul Krugman (and the other authors mentioned in the Dissent article I linked to above) the “far left” violates the common understanding that people have of that term. There’s a whole lot of space between a Dennis Kucinich or a Noam Chomsky and a Paul Krugman.

Mr. Sides,

I take issue with the criteria you use in your classification of blog readers as being on the “right” or “left” wings.

Your article says you “constructed a measure of political ideology by drawing on blog readers’ attitudes toward stem cell research, abortion, the Iraq war, the minimum wage and capital gains tax cuts. Using this measure, we then arrayed respondents from left to right.”

The problem (as detailed by Barbinmd on a frontpage post Jul 17, 2008 at 09:05:26 AM at dailykos, http://barbinmd.dailykos.com/) is that the choices you use as proxies to place people on the political spectrum are skewed. According to polling data at pollingreport.com, the majority of America agrees with the “leftist” position.

This does not challange your larger point regarding how Americans only pursue information from a limited number of blog resources with similar ideological leanings. It does suggest that your work reinforces the (largely successful) efforts of Republicans and conservatives to label their policies the “center” and anything less reactionary “the left”. If the majority of America wants to withdraw from Iraq, allow abortion, raise the minimum wage and conduct stem cell research then those positions define the center, and to continue to label such positions as “left wing” is inaccurate.

This remains a comparatively minor point in the scheme of your research, and the terms our larger discourse make mistakes such as this more understandable, if not palatable.

best,

Josef