Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Political Participation and the Blogosphere

这个项目利用了一个极其丰富的政治数据来源--政治博客圈，以了解人类互动的永恒方面：关注、意见、分歧、说服和参与。很少有场所比博客圈更好地跨越政治思想的光谱，博客圈是一个庞大的“网络日志”及其作者的在线网络。大约有130万美国人至少偶尔会写关于政治的博客，现在每天的总读者人数超过了主要报纸，每天的总字数达到数千万。这一多样化的媒体捕捉了各行各业人士的想法，所有人都在一个公共论坛上发出自己的声音，这在一代人之前几乎是不可想象的。该项目的智力价值在于它能够为长期存在的关于政治参与的问题提供新的解释。以前的研究主要集中在博客有何不同，特别是博客与传统新闻有何不同。相比之下，这个项目展示了政治博客与政治激进主义惊人的相似之处。引导人们投票、抗议或给公职人员写信的社会力量也可以引导他们写关于政治的博客。因此，政治参与的经典理论可以为博客的研究提供借鉴。本项目的第一部分探讨了这些相似性。这位调查者详细描述了推动政治博客圈参与的力量，并展示了博客圈代表和扭曲了选民的声音。相反，来自博客圈的数据可以为研究政治参与开辟新的途径。与大多数交流方式不同，写博客会留下永久的数据痕迹。网上有数以千计的政治博客的档案，包括文本、日期、链接和评论。该项目使用社会科学和计算机科学的技术组合来挖掘这些丰富的社会数据：调查研究、内容分析、网络爬行和自动文本分类。使用这种跨学科的工具组合，调查员调查了数百名博客作者，并分析了100多万篇博客帖子。在这个过程中，研究人员在社会科学和计算机科学之间建立了方法论的桥梁，为未来的研究提供了软件和数据。这些数据提供了一些线索，揭示了在其他情况下很难观察到的行为，但这些行为对社会和民主有着深刻的影响。这个项目的后半部分考察了通过博客参与政治的时机、主题和语气。过去在这一领域的大多数研究都解释了参与程度，关注的是公民可能参与政治的程度。来自博客圈的丰富数据使调查者能够超越对参与程度的研究，并检查政治博客帖子的时机、主题和语气。博客作者的时机和话题选择揭示了信息流、舆论和社会注意力分配的模式。研究者还将话语语气视为理性、文明话语中的一个关键因素。通过对参与的这些方面进行分析，研究人员希望以前所未有的规模对这些方面进行细致的分析，以整合过去被分开的社会科学的各个部分。这个项目对研究美国社会的三个重要和快速变化的方面做出了三个广泛的贡献：新闻业、政治参与和公民话语。美国新闻业的技术、经济和文化正处于快速转型的状态。通过阐明博客作者与传统记者的不同之处，该项目将阐明新媒体和新闻业的发展方向。此外，自20世纪90年代对公民激进主义的经典研究以来，新的沟通和参与模式戏剧性地进入了政治。通过将博客作为公民参与的一种行为进行调查，该项目将推动对竞选活动、机构、利益团体和公民个人如何利用这些新渠道来重塑参与和政府结果的研究。此外，许多观察家评论说，美国公民话语在过去20年里急剧转向党派两极分化。人们对这种转变的程度、原因和后果仍知之甚少。通过博客的视角研究话语可能会让我们对这一最近的趋势有更深入的了解。

This project taps an extremely rich source of political data, the political blogosphere, in order to understand timeless aspects of human interaction: attention, opinion, disagreement, persuasion, and participation. Few venues span the spectrum of political ideas better than the blogosphere, the sprawling online network of "web-logs" and their authors. Roughly 1.3 million Americans blog at least occasionally about politics, aggregate daily readership now exceeds that of major newspapers, and aggregate daily word counts reach the tens of millions. This diverse medium captures the thoughts of people from all walks of life, all lending their voices to a public forum that was almost unimaginable a generation ago.The intellectual merit of the project lies in its capacity to shed new light on long-standing questions about political participation. Previous research has focused primarily on how blogging is different, especially how blogging differs from traditional journalism. In contrast, this project shows how political blogging is strikingly similar--to political activism. The same social forces that lead people to vote, protest, or write letters to public officials can also lead them to blog about politics. Thus, classic theories of political participation can inform the study of blogging. The first part of this project explores these similarities. The investigator details the forces that drive participation in the political blogosphere, and shows where the blogosphere represents--and distorts--the voice of the electorate. Conversely, data from the blogosphere can open new avenues of research into political participation. Unlike most forms of communication, blogging leaves a permanent data trail. Archives of thousands of political blogs exist online, complete with text, dates, links, and comments. This project taps this wealth of social data using a combination of techniques from social and computer science: survey research, content analysis, web crawling, and automated text classification. Using this interdisciplinary mix of tools, the investigator surveys hundreds of bloggers and analyzes over a million blog posts. In the process, the researcher builds methodological bridges between social and computer science, making software and data available for future research. These data provide clues into behaviors that are hard to observe in other contexts, but matter deeply for society and for democracy. The second half of this project examines the timing, topics, and tone of political participation via blogging. Most past studies in this area have explained levels of participation, focusing on how much citizens are likely to get involved in politics. Rich data from the blogosphere enable the investigator to move beyond the study of levels of participation and examine the timing, topics, and tone of political blog posts. Bloggers' timing and choice of topics reveal patterns in information flow, public opinion, and social allocation of attention. The investigator also looks at tone of discourse as a key element in rational, civil discourse. By analyzing these aspects of participation together, in fine detail and at unprecedented scale, the researcher hopes to integrate strands of social science that have been separate in the past. This project makes three broad contributions to the study of three vital and rapidly changing aspects of US society: journalism, political participation, and civic discourse. The technology, economics, and culture of American journalism are in a state of rapid transition. By illuminating the ways bloggers are different from traditional journalists, this project will shed light on the directions new media and journalism are headed. In addition, since the classic studies of citizen activism in the 1990s, new modes of communication and participation have made a dramatic entrance into politics. By investigating blogging as an act of civic participation, this project will advance the study of how campaigns, agencies, interest groups, and individual citizens are using these new outlets to reshape participation and the outcomes of government. Moreover, many observers have commented that American civic discourse has made a sharp turn towards partisan polarization in the last two decades. The extent, causes, and consequences of this shift remain poorly understood. Studying discourse through the lens of blogging may offer insight into this recent trend.