Q & A: State of The Canadian Political Blogosphere
February 28th, 2008See magazine asks:
I noticed the post on Alberta Blogs about election candidates who are also bloggers and was wondering if you have any idea how many political bloggers there are in Alberta? And how they break down by political persuasion? I’ve got a handful I visit regularly, but I’m sure it’s no where near the total.
That’s a good question, and it would require quite a bit of digging.
I’d have to go through all the bloggers in the blogrolls for the Blogging Tories, Dippers, Liberals, Greens and other political parties and try to figure out which ones are in Alberta.
So, telling the Alberta-specific story is quite laborious.
However, I did a small bit of digging tonight, and put the blogrolls for the Tories, Liberals,NDP and Greens into a spreadsheet. If we define this as the ‘Anglo’ blogosphere in Canada and leave out PQ blogs, here is how the percentages break down:
# of Blogs, as % of Total:
Tories Liberals NDP Green
319 260 109 146
38.25% 31.18% 13.07% 17.51%
These proportions square roughly with recent polling numbers, save for the data on the Greens.
An aside: when I did the Great Canadian Blog Survey, before the Conservatives were elected, the total vote for bloggers and blog readers, when asked which party they’d vote for, mirrored the national election numbers, when they finally came out. However, fringe parties were definitely active in the blogosphere.
Here is a salient point: Underdog parties are often over-represented in terms of bloggers. Federally, the Greens are extremely active in the blogosphere, and one might say they’re over-represented. There are many green and ‘fringe-political’ bloggers, but their audiences are small when compared to the more traditional parties. They are trying to use this form of media as ‘DIY’ media. Other formats, such as newsprint, television and radio tend to only grant a voice to parties who have seats, which serves to enforce the status quo. The blogosphere is a free-for-all, and so we see many fringe parties using the medium of blogging to get their message out. But the real question is left begging:
Who is listening?
The blogosphere seems to be structured this way: traditional parties are represented accurately and enjoy a higher number of readers per writer. Newer or more fringe parties have more a higher proportion of writers, but fewer readers. At least that’s my hunch. It makes sense, at least to me, because these parties feel like underdogs, and they possibly feel the traditional forms of media have left them behind. Thus, they are picking up readers. The real question would be in examining the rates of growth for readerships, by political party. If more people are reading fringe blogs, then alternative political paradigms might be catching on. If not, then the blogosphere is not re-shaping mass political consciousness.
A comment: it’s interesting to look at the number of blogs versus polling numbers, because telephone polls are limited. Rick Mercer sums it up well:
http://www.rickmercer.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/2/27
To save you some reading, pollsters phone people. Who have land lines. And they call during supper, when most bloggers are probably blogging. Younger people tend to blog, and younger people tend to avoid the land line and instead opt for a cellular phone. Thus, polls probably leave younger people out of the picture. And political parties actually make decisions based on these polls. So they’re leaving a younger voice out of the national debate.
While this doesn’t answer your question, it may give you some leads. To determine the specific numbers, you’d have to visit 834 blogs and figure out which ones are written by Albertans eligible to vote in the provincial election.
