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Network Formation in the Political Blogosphere: An Application of Agent Based Simulation and e-Research Tools

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Abstract

The political blogosphere has become the focus of attention of researchers from disciplines such as political science and network science. In a recent paper, Adamic and Glance (LinkKDD ’05: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on link discovery, 2005, pp. 443–452) report differences between the linking behavior of politically conservative versus politically liberal web bloggers. We construct a simple agent-based network formation model which shows that one such difference, demonstrating what we term ‘political homophily’, can be generated by connecting the blogosphere to the underlying population distribution of political preferences. The model is implemented as a web service in the e-Research tool VOSON (Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks), and both model and tool serve to define a natural environment for research into link formation behavior with large numbers of heterogeneous network participants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Robert Ackland

  2. Department of Economics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria

    Jamsheed Shorish

  3. Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Jamsheed Shorish

Authors
  1. Robert Ackland
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  2. Jamsheed Shorish
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Correspondence to Jamsheed Shorish.

Additional information

An earlier version of this paper appeared as a working paper in the Institute for Advanced Studies’ Economics Series working paper archive. This paper was written while both authors were Visiting Fellows of the U.K.’s National Centre for e-Social Science, at Oxford University (RA) and the University of Manchester (JS). We would like to thank participants at the Third International Conference on e-Social Science, October 7–9, 2007, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments.

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Ackland, R., Shorish, J. Network Formation in the Political Blogosphere: An Application of Agent Based Simulation and e-Research Tools. Comput Econ 34, 383–398 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-009-9173-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-009-9173-7

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