The power and politics of blogs

Longtime readers of danieldrezner.com are aware that I’ve been trying to exploit my hobby (blogging) for professional gain (peer-reviewed publications). Towards that end, Henry Farrell and I have been slowly co-authoring a paper on blogs and politics. We’ve completed our first draft of “The Power and Politics of Blogs.” Henry ably summarizes our key arguments:

(1) Blogging is politically important in large part because it affects mainstream media, and helps set the terms of political debate (in political science jargon, it creates ‘focal points’ and ‘frames’). Note that we don’t provide an exhaustive account of blogs and politics – some aspects of blogging (fundraising for parties, effects on political values in the general public), we don’t have more than anecdotal data on. There’s plenty of room for other people to do interesting research on all of this. (2) Incoming links in the political blogosphere are systematically skewed, but not according to a “power law” distribution, as Clay Shirky and others have argued of the blogosphere as a whole. Instead, they follow a lognormal distribution. We reckon that the most likely explanation for this is that offered by Pennock et al. – they argue that not only do the ‘rich get richer’ (i.e. sites that already have a lot of links tend to get more), but that link-poor sites stand a chance of becoming rich too. Late entrants into the political blogosphere can do well in the political blogosphere as long as they’re interesting and attract some attention – bad timing isn’t destiny. (3) Because of the systematic skewedness of the political blogosphere, a few “focal point” sites can provide a rough index of what is going on in the blogosphere – interesting points of view on other sites will often percolate up to them as smaller blogs try to get big blogs to link to them, by informing them of interesting stories. Thus, we may expect that journalists and other media types who read blogs will tend to all gravitate towards a few ‘big name’ bloggers as their way of keeping up with what is going on in the blogosphere as a whole.

Both bloggers and blog readers are encouraged to download it and tell us what you think. Be warned, however: this paper is primarily intended for a scholarly auduence, which means there’s some jargon that might appear confusing but is — like most jargon — a form of shorthand for fellow professionals. Most of it should be pretty digestible, however. Read it and post your comments below or over at Crooked Timber. Finally, a quick thank-you to Henry — I’ve tried co-authoring papers in the past, and it’s been a disaster. This paper was a breeze. UPDATE: More scholar-blogger research from Glenn Reynolds. With experimental evidence no less! More seriously, this report by Jeff Jarvis from his Aspen Institute experience with Big Media machers supports one of our paper’s hypotheses. In particular:

I gave a spiel on technology and the newsroom — about more than just weblogs, but it turned into a discussion of just weblogs — and at our closing session, half the [media macher] participants said they were awakened about blogs and even frightened of being left behind in this blog thing. In previous sessions like this, I’ve heard half the big media guys dis and dismiss blogs, but there was none of that here, none of it. The curiousity about blogs ranged from cautious to cordial to rabid. These big media guys (not unlike the mullahs of Iran) realize that blogs are here to stay; we are a force to be reckoned with; and now they’re reckoning what to do about it.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen offers constructive criticism and calls the paper a “mini-classic.” Dean Esmay offers a long critique that boils down to:

[T]hey seem to have missed the most obvious point of all: that our poltical discourse in America has always been influenced by a comparatively tiny number of voices.

Dean points to small-circulation political magazines as evidence for this recurring pattern in American political history. I think I can speak for Henry as well as myself when I say that we are aware of this fact. Indeed, what we find interesting is that this phenomenon has been replicated for the blogosphere. However, compared to blogs, these kind of publications generally posses two advantages. First, a lot of elite media journals have been founded and operated by those who were already politically influential and well-connected. Second, these journals needed to have sufficient resources to pay for minor things like salaries, distribution, and printing runs. Neither of these conditions holds particularly well for blogs. No doubt, some pioneer bloggers — Andrew Sullivan most notably — have been well-connected. But this is not true of most of the influential bloggers. As for material resources, some bloggers are now able to earn some scratch, but this is an effect rather than a cause of their success. What’s interesting is that despite these differences, and despite the low barriers to entry, the blogosphere looks like a similar link on the oipinion chain.