Political Blogs Research Articles

Individualized and Depoliticized: A Study of Chinese Blogosphere in Singapore

Research on new media such as blogs examines users’ motivations and gratifications, and how individuals and organizations use them for political participation. In Singapore, political blogs have attracted much public scrutiny due to the bloggers’ online and offline challenges of official discourse. While previous research has established the political significance of these blogs, extant scholarship is limited to blogs written in the English language. Little is known about blogs maintained by the Chinese community, the largest ethnic group in multi-racial Singapore. This study is a first to examine this community and the space they inhabit online. Through web crawling, we identified 201 Chinese-language blogs and through content analysis, we analyzed if Chinese bloggers contributed to public debates and used their blogs for civic engagement. Their content, motivations for blogging in the language, hyperlinking practices and use of badges indicated that Chinese bloggers in Singapore do not use blogs for political participation and mobilization, but are individualized and a-politicized. We discuss possible reasons and implications in this paper.

Web 2.0 and deliberation. The ongoing practice of political debate in weblogs

This article focuses on the critical analysis of the blogosphere, in order to question its potential technological and political uses. As a starting point, we hypothesize that the blogosphere constitutes a particular form of public sphere in a discursive space, with a political density, in which practices of deliberation can take place. We will evaluate the debate concerning the identification of the blogosphere with the concept of the public sphere in order to develop this argument. We will do it by referencing the normative requirements of the deliberative model and patterns of interaction between authors and readers of blogs. By means of this approach, it will be possible to 1) confront the conditions for the existence of deliberation with the critical points of the generalized use of the blogosphere; 2) identify the basic elements of a framework of analysis to assess the existence of deliberative practices in the blogosphere; and 3) summarize the results of empirical studies conducted on this subject. Concerning these issues, we will analyze the quality of the debate around the concept of austerity” in two blogs that are politically connected with parties. Data showed the prevalence of homophily, which is embodied in a cyberbalcanization phenomenon. Therefore, all the discursive process is characterized by well-defined polarization patterns, supported in extreme views. We concluded that the concept of deliberation does not apply to the more general type of communication in these two political blogs. It could be applied to a concept of participation; however, from a deliberative standpoint, it could only be understood as a lighter form of social interaction, with little density in a political plan.

Vertex nomination schemes for membership prediction

Suppose that a graph is realized from a stochastic block model where one of the blocks is of interest, but many or all of the vertices' block labels are unobserved. The task is to order the vertices with unobserved block labels into a ``nomination list'' such that, with high probability, vertices from the interesting block are concentrated near the list's beginning. We propose several vertex nomination schemes. Our basic - but principled - setting and development yields a best nomination scheme (which is a Bayes-Optimal analogue), and also a likelihood maximization nomination scheme that is practical to implement when there are a thousand vertices, and which is empirically near-optimal when the number of vertices is small enough to allow comparison to the best nomination scheme. We then illustrate the robustness of the likelihood maximization nomination scheme to the modeling challenges inherent in real data, using examples which include a social network involving human trafficking, the Enron Graph, a worm brain connectome and a political blog network.

Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs

AbstractThis article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people, of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highly familiar from previous research on radical right discourse. However, what seems to characterize populist radical right discourse in the Nordic context is the strong reliance on the rhetorical juxtaposition between the welfare system and immigration. Our study furthermore highlights how populist radical right politicians exploit the digital discursive tools provided by political blogging. These tools, first, create a sense of connectedness and mutual understanding between blogger and reader and, second, allow the blogger to convey messages that are hostile towards immigrants and ethnic minorities without expressing an explicit personal opinion. In combination, the features provided by political blogging and the discursive and rhetorical strategies that deny racism make discourse within a populist radical right political blog especially powerful and convincing. We conclude that research must be sensitive to this ‘digital discourse’, as it reaches a public far beyond the sphere of a political blog through its potential to spread and influence mainstream media.

Angry Words: A Content Analysis of Emotion in Political Blogs and Op-Ed Columns

Since the Internet became widely available in the 1990s, scholars have studied the online discourse around public affairs and politics. Davis (1999, p. 162) studied political conversations on the now little-used Internet message board system Usenet and found what he calls “discussion dominance” in which posters “launch into rhetorical excess” and talk not to one another but past one another. Chait (2007), is his examination of the “netroots” movement, reported that bloggers avoid moderate ideas and language at all costs, seeing moderation as a concession. Johnson and Kay (2004) surveyed blog readers online and found that two-thirds wanted not fairness from blogs but bias that supports their views. Writers in both the popular press and academic journals have argued that political blogs have increased the rancor and divisiveness in public life. Keen (2007, p. 3) writes that blogs have “perfected” political extremism. Habermas (1999) believes that rational public discourse requires sincerity in a deliberative space, but Sunstein (2007) argues that the challenge to Habermas’ view is that blog readers who read primarily like-mind points of view are more extreme in their political stances. Utych (2011) found that readers of political blogs are more likely to hold extreme opinions than citizens who get their news from the traditional media. In a study of incivility in online media, Borah (2012) found that divisive rhetoric on political blogs could lead to polarization of attitudes and erode deliberative discourse. Over the past few years, scholars have begun to focus the language and rhetoric of American political discourse online. Sobieraj and Berry (2011), continuing a strain of research into incivility in American political life, had independent coders looks for incidents of “outrage” on cable TV, talk radio, political blogs and newspaper columns using 13 categories of outrage incidents, including “name calling,” “emotional display,” “mockery/sarcasm,” and “emotional language.” One hundred percent of TV episodes and 98.8% of talk radio programs contained outrage, while “only” 82.8% of blog posts incorporated outrage writing. Serfaty (2011) argues that political blogs thrive on strong emotions and that posts on these blogs are devised to arouse intense political emotion.

If Pandora had a Blog

In the context of internet genre migration and proliferation, conventional taxonomies are no longer valid. To classify blogs between thematic and personal blogs is to blissfully ignore the legions of successful content prosumers, from political blogs to travel blogs, from food blogs to MAD (mom and dad) blogs, from fashion blogs to milblogs. With the recent explosion of social media, the digital landscape shifted and today there are more voices online than ever before. For blogs, however, the original purpose for communication has always been twofold: to inform and to emote. Computer-mediated communication may be overpopulated with a myriad of mixed forms and blogs might be dead or simply, difficult to reach with so much overlapping. Yet high-impact blogs still remain and are widely read. This paper explores the language of high-impact blogs, testing a new methodology for genre analysis to solve genre hybridity in the case of computer-mediated discourse.

Robust and computationally feasible community detection in the presence of arbitrary outlier nodes

Community detection, which aims to cluster $N$ nodes in a given graph into $r$ distinct groups based on the observed undirected edges, is an important problem in network data analysis. In this paper, the popular stochastic block model (SBM) is extended to the generalized stochastic block model (GSBM) that allows for adversarial outlier nodes, which are connected with the other nodes in the graph in an arbitrary way. Under this model, we introduce a procedure using convex optimization followed by $k$-means algorithm with $k=r$. Both theoretical and numerical properties of the method are analyzed. A theoretical guarantee is given for the procedure to accurately detect the communities with small misclassification rate under the setting where the number of clusters can grow with $N$. This theoretical result admits to the best-known result in the literature of computationally feasible community detection in SBM without outliers. Numerical results show that our method is both computationally fast and robust to different kinds of outliers, while some popular computationally fast community detection algorithms, such as spectral clustering applied to adjacency matrices or graph Laplacians, may fail to retrieve the major clusters due to a small portion of outliers. We apply a slight modification of our method to a political blogs data set, showing that our method is competent in practice and comparable to existing computationally feasible methods in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, our result is the first in the literature in terms of clustering communities with fast growing numbers under the GSBM where a portion of arbitrary outlier nodes exist.

Experiments in International Relations: Lab, Survey, and Field

At conferences, at seminars, and on political science blogs, the potential utility of experimental methods for international relations (IR) research continues to be a hotly contested topic. Given the recent rise in creative applications of experimental methods, now is a useful moment to reflect more generally on the potential value of experiments to study international affairs, how these inherently micro-level methods can shed light on bigger-picture questions, what has been learned already, what goals are probably out of reach, and how various research agendas in IR might productively incorporate experiments.

Students blogging about politics: A study of students' political engagement and a teacher's pedagogy during a semester-long political blog assignment

Many scholars have written about the Internet’s potential for engaging youth in public issues, but there has been little empirical research on the political engagement outcomes from students’ classroom-based use of web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, or the pedagogies involved in designing such experiences. This paper begins to address this gap by analyzing the development of political engagement among several dozen high school students who were required to complete political blogs for their required U.S. government course and by exploring their teacher’s pedagogical strategies and challenges. We analyzed data from 22 classroom observations, 15 student interviews, three teacher interviews, and surveys from over 300 students (including a large comparison group) given at the beginning and end of the fall 2012−13 semester. Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that students in the blog-focused classes developed greater political interest, internal political efficacy, and self-efficacy for political writing than other students. We also found that the teacher did not actively encourage interactive posting in order to avoid heated exchanges – but that many students expressed an interest in seeing more responses to their online writing. We discuss implications for practice and research.

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Democracy Facing Complexity the Network Form of the Public Sphere

According to Friedland et al, „classical public sphere theory captures a particular dynamics of history, a point where reasonable discussion on politics is both possible and normative among certain groups” (2006). While the functionnalist approach was criticized by many, taking into account the powerful effects of the mass media system and impact on deliberation process, Habermas revised his theory (2006) and highlighted the centrality of the network at a number of levels, the increased complexity (multiple publics, increased fragmentation and privatisation of the opinion, the increased complexity and autonomy of political and economical systems) and „the loss of subsistemic levels, increased flows of communication from below creating instability throughout of the entire system”. This instability is then related to the make sense processes, core meanings and semantic links that govern digital environments and the networks’ enthelechy. In our research we used the grounded theory qualitative method (Glaser, Strauss in 1967, Strauss, 1987, Corbin,1992), to create a model that identifies the main characteristics of the object of research (Babchuk, 1996) . We aimed to analyze the representation of events on the political scene in the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014 as mapped by the most important political blogs in Romania. Currently, the research field is divided in terms of methodological strategy between two approaches: those who use this type of social network analysis in political science and sociology from a perspective focused on the study and relevance of content (categories, concepts, core meanings) and a second perspective, less interested in the relationships between nodes that form a network, focusing on what Newman (2003) characterizes as " large-scale statistical properties of graphs". However, many networks can not be adequately represented by random graphs and seem to have a very different distribution from other home network links. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s5p45

Reading a Blog When Empowered to Comment: Posting, Lurking, and Non-Interactive Reading

How do readers who are able to post responses on a political blog (“interactive readers”) differ in their navigation and comprehension from “noninteractive” readers who are not empowered to post? In this study, a nonpartisan political blog was populated with news content about the then-upcoming 2012 U.S. presidential election. Seventy participants recruited from the Internet were randomly assigned to be either interactive or noninteractive readers. The ability to post affected readers' navigation of the site and comprehension of the news content on the blog: Interactive readers spent significantly longer on the site and performed significantly better on an inference verification task than noninteractive readers. A second set of analyses compared lurkers (those who are able to post but do not) with the posters and readers. Lurkers' navigation and comprehension were more similar to the noninteractive readers' but were not identical; lurkers performed better on the inference task than noninteractive readers. The findings suggest that the increasing trend for websites to enable posted responses may benefit not only readers' engagement but their comprehension as well and that lurkers may comprehend differently from readers who are not empowered to post.

Causes and Consequences of Selective Exposure Among Political Blog Readers: The Role of Hostile Media Perception in Motivated Media Use and Expressive Participation

ABSTRACTConcerns about selective exposure to partisan information have become a mainstay for scholars of political communication in the changing media environment. This study draws on a survey of a unique population—readers of political blogs—to explore the relationship between perceptions of mainstream media bias (as hostile media perception) and selective exposure to media sources that provide like-minded information as well as social support. We find that hostile media perception is an important motivator for partisan selective exposure among this audience, and also that such perceptions can lead indirectly to expressive political participation by encouraging visits to politically homogeneous online spaces.

“Battle of the Mei-Meis”

On May 7, 2011, Singapore held its 16th General Election. The ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) predictably secured a landslide victory, and yet the result was contextually historic, with the opposition winning six seats from a possible eighty-seven—the largest loss for the PAP since political independence in 1965. At the centre of the General Election was a persistent media buzz surrounding two young female candidates: Tin Pei Ling of the People’s Action Party and Nicole Seah of the National Solidarity Party. While the former suffered sustained criticism, the latter received sustained praise. This article seeks to analyze the manner in which these two women were positioned as inverse feminine subjects within the mediascape. The analysis emerges from data collected from 194 sources which appeared online between March 29, 2011 and May 8, 2011, comprising political blogs, discussion forums, articles, and reports from online news sites. It aims to reveal how the gendered media constructions of, and public responses to, both women interpolate a diametrically opposed positive and negative binary of womanhood which functions to: (1) reify national discourses of ideal femininity; and (2) corroborate regional conceptualizations of “good” and “bad” feminine subjectivities.

Innovation Resistance of Political Websites and Blogs among Internet Users in Singapore

AbstractThe Internet has become an influential platform to disseminate diverse political perspectives and promote democracy. With the prevalent use of the Internet, Singapore is a unique context to examine if its people resist online political information in a socio-political situation where politics is considered a sensitive domain and content regulation is imposed on mainstream media. The study integrates the concept of innovation resistance and the ideas derived from the Technology Acceptance Model to explore the reasons why Singaporeans resist political websites and blogs. After a focus group discussion, a web survey by Nielsen of 607 respondents using a sampling frame to ensure representativeness of Singapore's Internet users found that more than 40 per cent had never visited even one political website or blog. The data analysis reveals five main factors that cause the innovation resistance: perceived usefulness/image barrier, realization, perceived ease of use, peer influence and habitual conflict. ...

Predicting Elections: Considering Tools to Pool the Polls

Surveys have long been critical tools for understanding elections and forecasting their results. As the number of election surveys has increased in prevalence, researchers, journalists, and standalone political bloggers have sought to learn from the wealth of information released. This paper explores three central strategies for pooling surveys and other information to better understand both the state of an election and what can be expected when voters head to the polls. Aggregation, predictive modeling, and hybrid models are assessed as ways of improving on the results of individual surveys. For each method, central questions, key choices, applications, and considerations for use are discussed. Trade-offs in choices between pooling strategies are considered, and the accuracies of each set of strategies for forecasting results in 2012 are compared. Although hybrid models have the potential to most accurately pool election information and make predictions, the simplicity of aggregations and the theory-testing capacity of predictive models can sometimes prove more valuable.

Australian journalist-blogs: A shift in audience relationships or mere window dressing?

Previous research has been critical of mainstream media’s attempts at blogging, with studies finding that journalists are maintaining their traditional gatekeeper function and failing to engage with readers. This study examines the work of 13 journalists who have political blogs on Australian mainstream newspaper websites, with data gathered from a content analysis of comment-threads as well as interviews. Surprisingly, the results show that most of these journalists are engaging with readers, and some have been doing so since July 2006. They regard such participation as an essential part of their blogging practice, and see their role as not only moderators but also facilitators of discussion. These results contrast with overseas studies which show there is a ‘minimalist’ view of participation that dominates in journalistic organisations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.

A deliberative public sphere? Picturing Portuguese political blogs

Deliberative democracies are based on the principle of citizens’ participation. However, election turnouts and citizens’ alienation are signs of a political disengagement that could endanger the foundations of democratic systems. The spaces in which political debate and rational argumentation between equals may take place have diminished, yet new digital technologies have brought up potentialities in the promotion of online, horizontal and deliberative communication. Political blogs have been one of the most studied platforms, as they allow citizens engaged in political discussion and argumentation to establish a public sphere in which matters of public concern are debated. Nonetheless, issues of political polarization, fragmentation and non-rational debate have also been pointed out to limit the most optimistic perspectives over political blogs. By using the social network analysis, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of Portuguese political blogs, by assessing its level of deliberation.

Quantifying Partisan Selective Exposure Through Network Text Analysis of Elite Political Blog Networks During the U.S. 2012 Presidential Election

ABSTRACTUtilizing network-based content analysis methodologies, this study examined 316,594 hyperlinks and 60,378 headlines culled from 20 elite, partisan political blogs through 10 months of the U.S. 2012 presidential year for evidence of partisan selective exposure in blog production practices. Hyperlinks reveal dense intra-interconnectivity among progressive blogs as opposed to conservative blogs. Elite, traditional media sources operated as bridges between spheres that otherwise tended to partisan selective exposure in their partisan source linking practices toward congenial media. Headline network text analysis revealed divergent issue and people agendas promoted between both partisan blog networks, providing very strong evidence for the operation of partisan selective exposure in the emergent content practices of these elite produser publics across the 2012 U.S. presidential year.

Forging Bonds and Burning Bridges

Putnam warned over a decade ago that the urge to associate with similar others online may lead to “cyberbalkanization,” fostering bonding capital at the expense of bridging capital. This study examines balkanization with respect to political blogs, investigating to what extent opinions in posts and comment sections on blogs associated with the left and right are ideologically polarized. We also investigate whether extreme opinions tend to co-occur with uncivil discourse aimed at political opponents. Finally, this study compares political blogs with a newer information source that bridges the gap between old and new media—newspaper blogs—asking whether polarization and incivility are reduced on that platform. A content analysis was conducted of blog discussions about a salient political event—Occupy Wall Street. In both posts and comments, political blogs were highly polarized and opinion extremity and incivility were correlated. However, content on newspaper blogs was largely unpolarized and civil.