Abstract
The rise of bloggers raises the vexing question of why blogs have any influence at all, given their relatively low readership and lack of central organization. We argue that to answer this question we need to focus on two key factors—the unequal distribution of readers across weblogs, and the relatively high readership of blogs among journalists and other political elites. The unequal distribution of readership, combined with internal norms and linking practices allows interesting news and opinions to rise to the “top” of the blogosphere, and thus to the attention of elite actors, whose understanding of politics may be changed by frames adopted from the blogosphere.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adamic, L., & Glance, N. (2005). The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on link discovery (pp. 36–43). Accessed at http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlogWWW.pdf.
Adamic, L., & Huberman, B. A. (1999). Technical comment to emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286, 509–512.
Akerlof, G. (1970). The market for “lemons”: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84, 488–500.
Albert, R., & Barabási, A. (2002). Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics, 74, 47–101.
Ashlin, A., & Ladle, R. J. (2006). Environmental science adrift in the blogosphere. Science, 312, 201.
Barabási, A. (2000). Power law distribution of the World Wide Web. Science, 287, 2115.
Blood, R. (2002). The Weblog Handbook. New York: Perseus Books.
Burt, R. S. (1980). Models of social structure. Annual Review of Sociology, 6, 79–141.
Cederman, L. E. (2003). Modelling the size of wars: from billiard balls to sandpiles. American Political Science Review, 97, 135–150.
Dautrich, K., & Barnes, C. (2005a). Freedom of the press survey: general population 2005. Storrs, CT, University of Connecticut, Department of Public Policy, May 14. Accessed at http://importance.corante.com/archives/UCONN_DPP_Survey_GenPop.pdf.
Dautrich, K., & Barnes, C. (2005b). Freedom of the press survey: journalists 2005. Storrs, CT, University of Connecticut, Department of Public Policy, May 14. Accessed at http://importance.corante.com/archives/UCONN_DPP_Survey_Journalists.pdf.
de Solla Price, D. (1976). A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27, 292–306.
Fan, D. P., Jasperson, A., Shah, D. V., Watts, M., & Faber, R. (1998). Framing and the public agenda: media effects on the importance of the federal budget deficit. Political Communication, 15, 205–224.
Gould, R. V. (2003). Uses of network tools in comparative historical research. In J. Mahoney & D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.), Comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481–510.
Greif, A. (1993). Contract enforceability and economic institutions in early trade: the Maghribi traders’ coalition. American Economic Review, 83, 525–548.
Hargrave, S. (2004). The blog busters. The Guardian, 9 August.
Henning, J. (2003). The blogging iceberg. Perseus Development Corporation. Accessed at http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html.
Hindman, M., Tsioutsiouliklis, K., & Johnson, J. (2003). ‘Googlearchy’: how a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics online. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 2003.
Huberman, B. A. (2002). Scale free networks: structure, dynamics and search. Mimeograph, Palo Alto, CA. Accessed at http://www.complexityscience.org/NoE/bernardo.pdf.
Kaus, M. (2003). The case against editors. Slate, 28 October.
Kurtz, H. (2003). Bill Keller’s changing times. Washington Post, 24 November, p. C1.
McCubbins, M., & Schwartz, T. (1984). Congressional oversight overlooked: police patrols versus fire alarms. American Journal of Political Science, 2, 165–179.
Nelson, T., Clawson, R., & Oxley, Z. (1997). Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance. American Political Science Review, 91, 567–583.
Newman, M. E. J. (2003). The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review, 45, 167–256.
Packer, G. (2004). The revolution will not be blogged. Mother Jones (May/June).
Padgett, J., & Ansell, C. K. (1993). Robust action and the rise of the medici. American Journal of Sociology, 98, 1259–1319.
Pennock, D. M., Flake, G. W., Lawrence, S., Glover, E. J., & Giles, C. L. (2002). Winners don’t take all: characterizing the competition for links on the Web. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 5207–5211.
Rainie, L. (2005). The state of blogging. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Washington, DC, January 2005. Accessed at http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf.
Rainie, L., Fox, S., & Fallows, D. (2003). Blogs gain a small foothold. Pew Internet & American Life Project, Washington, DC, January 2003. Accessed at http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/reports.asp?Report=87&Section=ReportLevel2&Field=Level2ID&ID=662.
Reynolds, G. (2003). Earlier I mentioned this post. Instapundit.com, October 1st. Available at http://instapundit.com/archives/011775.php.
Rosen, J. (2004). Interview with Thomas Edsall. July 28. Available at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/journal/audio/edsallblogsone.mp3.
Rosenberg, S. (2002). Much ado about blogging. Salon, 10 May.
Schelling, T. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shirky, C. (2003). Power laws, Weblogs and inequality. Accessed at http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html.
Simon, H. (1955). On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika, 42, 425–440.
Smolkin, R. (2004). The expanding blogosphere. American Journalism Review, 14, 100–111.
Sugden, R. (1995). A theory of focal points. The Economic Journal, 105, 533–550.
von Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35, 519–530.
Watts, D. (1999). Small worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Watts, D. (2003). Six degrees: the science of a connected age. New York: Norton.
Wellman, B., & Berkowitz, S. D. (1988). Introduction: studying social structure. In B. Wellman & S. D. Berkowitz (Eds.), Social structure: a network approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Farrell, H., Drezner, D.W. The power and politics of blogs. Public Choice 134, 15–30 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-007-9198-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-007-9198-1