The Monkey Cage

Henry, Eric Lawrence, and I have just finished a working paper that analyzes the first decent dataset of blog readers. The paper is here on SSRN or here, ungated.

The paper is motivated by normative questions about whether blogs facilitate deliberation and participation. We analyze this 2006 survey, in which about 15,000 respondents were asked whether they read blogs and which blogs they read. Some findings:

• 34% of respondents said they read a blog. 14% of respondents named a political blog.

• Political blog readers are, unsurprisingly, more educated, more partisan, and more interested in politics. These traits help give rise to the other findings described below.

• Almost all political blog readers read only blogs from one side of the political spectrum. Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.

• There is almost no overlap in the ideological orientation of readers of left- and right-wing blogs. Below is Figure 6 from the paper, mapping the ideologies of readers of some prominent blogs. The figure presents “violin plots.” The shape of the violins corresponds to where people are located on this measure of ideology. The white dots are the medians. Readers of the left-wing blogs are clustered on the lefthand side. Readers of right-wing blogs are on the opposite side. This is the polarization that the paper discusses.

• Blog readers are more likely to participate in politics than are people who don’t read blogs. Left-wing blog readers are more participatory than right-wing blog readers. We speculate that left-wing blogs have more fully embraced the tasks of social movements, thereby seeking to mobilize their readers.

These survey data do not allow us to make causal claims, but determining causation is is not the point of the paper. Instead, we use the observed patterns of association to draw implications for the normative value of political blogs. For most people, reading political blogs does not lead to deliberation — that is, to an exchange across partisan or ideological lines. People mainly inhabit “comforting cocoons of cognitive consonance.” But reading blogs may facilitate other normatively valuable behaviors, such as participation. Indeed, blogs like the Daily Kos explicitly want to stimulate participation more than deliberation (see Henry’s previous post).

This is a working paper, and suggestions are welcome.

(See also Henry’s post at Crooked Timber.)

Posted by John Sides at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Via Dan Nexon, I see that Daniel Little has a blog, Understanding Society with lots of interesting stuff. Little’s book Varieties of Social Explanation is my favourite introduction to the philosophy of social science, and his blog is very good too. It’s part of a larger project, which includes interviews with Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and other pol-sci luminaries. Recommended.

Posted by Henry at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American Academy of Political and Social Science has a blog. It appears to be updated only occasionally, but there is some interesting stuff. See, for example, this piece by John Hibbing and Kevin Smith outlining the role of genetics in political behavior.

Posted by John Sides at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Moira Whelan speculates on Mike O’Hanlon and ‘think tank sociology.’

Think tanks in DC are traditionally known as refugee camps for the out-of-office team of foreign policy wonks. There’s an expected turn over when new administrations come on as each team goes about grabbing “the best and the brightest” to fill their ranks. O’Hanlon has by now gotten the message that he’s burned his bridges with his Democratic friends. Those that like him personally even agree that he’s radioactive right now thanks to his avid support of Bush’s war strategy. So what’s a wonk to do? … one option is pre-positioning yourself for the future. By getting out there and going after the leading Democrats—people that some of his closest colleagues are actively supporting—is he lining himself up to say that he was critiquing the next Administration before it was cool? That would be worth it, because as I’ve mentioned before, there are three forms of currency in the think tank world that make you a valuable player: bringing in money, getting press, and getting called to testify. This strategy could certainly pay off in those categories over the next few months.

Continue reading "Think Tank Sociology" »

Posted by Henry at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Continue reading "Conservative and liberal bloggers" »

Posted by Henry at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

If you’re interested in a state-by-state roundup of what’s being said across the political spectrum in the blogosphere as Super Tuesday approaches, click here on your favorite state. Pretty cool.

[Hat tip to Dave Mastio at BlogNetNews.com ]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unlike the residents of Garrison Keillor’s home town, all of whom are above average, we at “The Monkey Cage” turn out to be remarkably average. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, that’s the conclusion I draw from research by Laura McKenna and Antoinette Pole, as reported in their fact-filled article “What Do Bloggers Do: An Average Day on an Average Political Blog” (Public Choice, 134 (January 2008): 97-108).

The vast majority of political bloggers, McKenna and Pole report based on an online survey they recently completed, are white, well-educated, and male. We’re guilty as charged, except that David is Asian and John grew up in North Carolina and therefore was poorly educated. Most bloggers are young (between 26 and 41); admittedly, I’m a little older than that (yah, right). But on average, we’re about average.

What we do at “The Monkey Cage” also turns out to be about average. The core business of most political blogs consists of (1) providing readers with links to and comments about articles found elsewhere, including on other blogs, (2) discussing the issue positions or activities of political candidates, parties, and interest groups, and (3) speculating about upcoming votes. That’s pretty much what we do, too.

80% of political bloggers also try to serve as media watchdogs by keeping their readers informed about bias, misreporting, or omisisons in the media. We do a good deal of that, and it’s lots of fun.

One way in which we differ from most other political blogs is that the average political blogger tries to motivate his readers to become politically active in ways the blogger favors. We’re much more focused on political analysis than on political advocacy.

The key difference between us and the rest of the political blogosphere is that we (well, I) frequently post pictures of dogs and cats.

Naturally, we think the quality of our posts is way above average (but then we would, wouldn’t we?) and we’re delighted that many of our readers seem to think so, too.

All in all, I must admit that this is a pretty mundane post — but what would you expect when an average blogger on an average blog writes about average bloggers and their average posts on average blogs?

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Peter Orszag, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, has started a blog. However, the comments are off.

Posted by John Sides at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three comments about our comments policy are in order. First, we’ll try to read all comments, but we won’t always want to get involved in the back-and-forth of debate within the comments section. This is solely because we have competing pressures on our time, and in no way reflects on the quality of the comments, the pressing nature of questions raised about our posts, etc.

Second, the comments section is currently open to everyone. Our moderation will have a light touch. Again, we don’t have enough time to engage in micro-management, even if we were of a mind to. However, we will step in if we feel that comments are off-topic, unnecessarily offensive, or involve too high a degree of personal vitriol. Please be civil.

Third, we strongly prefer that all comments have the author’s actual first and last names attached. We believe that this will significantly enhance any exchange of knowledge or ideas. We acknowledge that there may be strategic reasons for anonymity in certain circumstances, but we urge authors to identify themselves

Posted by John Sides at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why are we writing this blog? Here is a probably-not-exhaustive set of reasons, in rough order of importance.

1) To publicize political science research. Political scientists have been relatively slow in progressing to the blogosphere. Within our general area of the academy, the prevalence of economists is perhaps most noteworthy—among others, Gary Becker, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Dani Rodrik, and Mark Thoma. The folks at Crooked Timber, including our colleague Henry Farrell, span various disciplines, including philosophy, economics, political science, and sociology. (Henry is also owed a significant debt of gratitude for his advice and guidance to us as we began to conceive and then establish this blog.)

Among political scientists in particular, there are the aforementioned Henry Farrell, Daniel Drezner, Jim Johnson, Simon Jackman, Marc Lynch, and the folks at Polysigh. Several blogs oriented around statistical methods (including Andrew Gelman’s and the Social Science Statistics Blog) and law (Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog and the Empirical Legal Studies Blog) also deal with topics within political science.

Of course, there are others we have not listed, but even if all of these blogs were itemized, political scientists would be under-represented. This is particularly true in our areas of study, which focus on public opinion and mass political behavior, both in American politics and in comparative perspective.

The consequence, as Henry Farrell has written in response to a comment by Ezra Klein, is that political science research gets short shrift from the media, the policy community, and the types of people who read academically-oriented blogs. We want to extend what Henry does at his Political Science Weblog, which is post abstracts to interesting papers. Our model is Marginal Revolution, which is perhaps the most important inspiration for this blog. We will post abstracts and links to articles, papers, and books, along with comments that summarize our own reactions and/or discuss the work's importance. We will occasionally highlight our own work, but will try to steer clear of wanton self-promotion. We will occasionally invite guest bloggers for temporary residence. Readers are always welcome to suggest new work that we might highlight. Ultimately, we hope that this blog will gain political science research greater attention and currency.

2) To provide informed commentary on political events and issues. Don’t read anything too self-important in the word “informed.” All we mean by that is that we will draw upon extant research, as well as our own data analyses, to speak to contemporary politics. Here, we are inspired in part by Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin’s work at Pollster.com. The main difference is that whereas Pollster.com serves mainly to collect and aggregate polls of Americans and to comment on issues within the domain of polling, we intend a broader scope, including topics unrelated to polling or elections or American politics. We will also try to be more directly engaged in testing and perhaps contesting propositions from journalists or commentators, much as Morris Fiorina has done in his book-length take-down of the red-blue state notion and the “culture war.” Ultimately, we want contemporary discourse about politics centered as much as possible on the best kinds of evidence.

3) To think aloud. Seth Roberts, another source of inspiration for this blog, has written “Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.” Thus, we envision short posts about items we have read or less than fully baked ideas that have occurred to us. Perhaps these posts will ultimately illuminate only our own intellectual shortcomings. But even if no one leaves comments or provides feedback or explains why we’re wrong, it will be useful just to write.

4) To indulge our non-academic interests. We don’t presume that everyone will be fascinated by our idiosyncratic pursuits. But we want the blog to have a "personality" that extends beyond political science.

Of course, as the blog develops, its purposes may change somewhat in response to both our own interests and those of our readers. At any point in time, we certainly welcome feedback that anyone may offer. Thanks for reading, and please come back soon.

Posted by John Sides at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)