The Power And Politics Of Blogs

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
DOI 10.1007/s11127-007-9198-1
The power and politics of blogs
Henry Farrell · Daniel W. Drezner
Received: 2 June 2007 / Accepted: 9 June 2007 / Published online: 12 September 2007
© Springer Science+Business Media, BV 2007
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 blo-
gosphere, and thus to the attention of elite actors, whose understanding of politics may be
changed by frames adopted from the blogosphere.
Keywords Blogs · Bloggers · US politics · Internet · WWW
1 Introduction
The rise of blogs raises some vexing issues for the study of politics. Why do bloggers and
their blogs have any inﬂuence at all? Despite its recent surge in growth, the blogosphere
has far less reach than other new media outlets for political information and analysis—talk
radio, cable news channels, or other online political websites. Blogs attract a small fraction
of attention compared to the mainstream media. As Table 1 demonstrates, the web presence
of major media outlets overshadows the most popular weblogs. Rainie, Fox and Fallows
(2003) reported that only 4% of online Americans reported going to blogs for information
and opinions, and concluded that: “The overall number of blog users is so small that it is not
possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.” The growth in
blog readership since then is impressive, but the awareness of blogs vis-à-vis other media
forms remains sharply constrained. Rainie (2005) revealed that 62% of online Americans
had no idea what a blog is. In the three months after the 2004 election, trafﬁc to major
political blogs fell by roughly 50%.
H. Farrell · D.W. Drezner (
)
Tufts, Medford, MA 02155, USA
e-mail: Daniel.Drezner@tufts.edu

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
Table 1 Web presence of media and blog outlets
Web site
Alexa ranking
Reach per million users
Google PageRank
(3 month average)
(out of 10)
CNN
26
20,030
8
New York Times
97
6,250
7
USA Today
281
3,260
7
Washington Post
292
2,840
8
Wall Street Journal
435
2,150
6
MSNBC
783
1,600
8
Time
1918
587
8
Daily Kos
4066
254
7
Instapundit
8242
205
7
Little Green Footballs
10015
135
6
Power Line
10514
153
6
Talking Points Memo
10808
156
7
Andrew Sullivan
10858
155
7
Wonkette
10285
146
6
Blog average
9255.4
172.0
6.57
Media average
547.4
5248.3
7.43
Sources: alexa.com; Google Toolbar (accessed 20 January 2005)
Compared to other actors in domestic politics—specialized interest groups, political ac-
tion committees, government bureaucrats, or elected ofﬁcials—bloggers do not appear to
be very powerful. There is no central organization to the blogosphere. There is no ideo-
logical consensus among its participants. Blogging as an activity is almost exclusively a
part-time enterprise undertaken for love rather than money. An October 2003 survey of the
blogosphere (Henning 2003) concluded:
Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses
it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will
be written very informally (often in “unicase”: long stretches of lowercase with ALL
CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant
messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations).
Despite these constraints, the common consensus is that blogs play an increasingly im-
portant role as a forum of public debate, with knock-on consequences for the media, politics,
and policy. Given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how and
when can bloggers exercise inﬂuence over political and policy outcomes?
This article addresses this puzzle by concentrating on two interrelated aspects of the
blogosphere: the unequal distribution of readers across the array of weblogs, and the ever-
increasing interactions between blogs and mainstream media outlets. Even though there
are over ten million bloggers, posting hundreds of thousands of new items daily, the me-
dian blogger has almost no political inﬂuence as measured by trafﬁc or hyperlinks. This
is because the distribution of weblinks and trafﬁc is heavily skewed, with a few bloggers
commanding most of the attention. This distribution parallels the one observed for politi-
cal websites in general (Hindman et al. 2003). Because of this distribution, a few “elite”

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
17
blogs can operate as both an information aggregator and as a “summary statistic” for the
blogosphere.
The skewed distribution of weblog inﬂuence makes it easy for observers to extract in-
formation or analysis from blogs—but a key reason they are important is that journalists
and opinion leaders are readers of blogs. Why? Personal network ties between media outlets
and blogs help; so does the local knowledge or policy expertise that some bloggers pos-
sess. Finally, blogs possess the comparative advantage of speedy publication—they have a
ﬁrst-mover advantage in socially constructing frames for understanding current events. As a
result, political commentators will rely on blogs as sources of interpretive frames for politi-
cal developments. Under a speciﬁc set of circumstances—when elite blogs concentrate their
attention on a breaking story or an underreported story—the agenda-setting power of blogs
may create focal points for general interest intermediaries (Schelling 1960).
This article is divided into six sections. The next section reviews the structure of the
blogosphere, demonstrating that incoming links to political weblogs follow a lognormal
distribution. Section 3 discusses the political implications of this skewed distribution in the
blogosphere. Section 4 examines how weblogs and more mainstream media interact in sym-
biotic ways to enhance the inﬂuence of blogs. Section 5 discusses the myriad constraints on
the inﬂuence of blogs. The ﬁnal section summarizes and concludes.
2 The networked structure of the blogosphere
Perhaps the most important difference between blogs and more traditional media is that
blogs are networked phenomena that rely on hyperlinks. Links between blogs take two
forms. First, many bloggers maintain a “blogroll” on their website; a list of blogs that they
frequently read or especially admire, with clickable links to the general URLs (web ad-
dresses) of those blogs. Blogrolls occupy a permanent position on the blog’s home page,
and are used to link to other blogs that have shared interests. Second, bloggers may write
speciﬁc posts that contain hyperlinks to other blogs. Unlike links in the blogroll, links within
posts will move off the front page and be archived as new posts replace old ones over time.
Typically, such posts themselves link directly to a speciﬁc post on the other blog (rather than
the blog’s general URL address), perhaps also providing some commentary on that post.
Links and page views are the currency of the blogosphere. Many bloggers desire a wide
readership. Blood (2002, p. 98) suggests that “[t]he most reliable way to gain trafﬁc [reader-
ship] is through a link on another weblog.” This stems from the nature of hypertext. Ceteris
paribus, when one blog links to another, the readers of the former blog are more likely to
read the latter after having clicked on a hyperlink than they would have been otherwise. If
they like what they read, they may even become regular readers of the second blog.
Thus, bloggers are keenly interested in discovering other blogs that link to them, and are
able to discover such blogs through a variety of means. These include analysis of trafﬁc data,
general search engines such as Google (http://www.google.com), searchable databases of
bloglinks such as Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) and the Blogosphere Ecosystem
(http://www.truthlaidbear/ecosystem.php).
Thus, the blogosphere is a networked phenomenon, a fact which has important conse-
quences both for how it works and how it may be studied. That blogs are linked together
in a network provides much of their speciﬁc character—blogs interact with each other con-
tinuously, linking back and forth, disseminating interesting stories, arguments and points of
view. Furthermore, blogs and the hyperlinks between them are amenable to network analy-
sis; the individual blogs may be treated as the “nodes” or “vertices” of the network and

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
the links connecting them as “ties” or “edges.” The number of links to a particular blog
(in network analysis terminology, the number of ties to a particular node) is its “degree.”
By studying the network of blogs, we may come to important conclusions about how they
work, and about how political blogs in particular may have important consequences for the
wider practice of politics.
The existing literature provides two partially overlapping approaches to the study of net-
works. First, economic sociologists have developed a variety of tools to study the social
and economic consequences of actors’ embeddedness within networks over the last ﬁfty
years (Gould 2003; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988; Burt 1980; Padgett and Ansell 1993).
This literature has concentrated on relatively small scale networks, or networks where sim-
plifying assumptions can be employed to render the data tractable without losing too much
analytical bite. The mathematical techniques that have been developed by sociologists be-
come exponentially more demanding as the size of the network increases, and soon require
inordinate levels of computing resources. Nevertheless, where applicable, these techniques
provide highly useful tools both for describing certain aspects of the network as a whole
(as, for example, the relative degree of centralization of the network), and speciﬁc relations
among sub-groups of actors within the network.
This kind of network analysis is relatively well known among political scientists. The
same is not true of a second, more recent body of work exploring the broader effects of
network topology, which borrows heavily from recent work in physics (Newman 2003; Al-
bert and Barabási 2002; Watts 1999, 2003), as well as from earlier traditions in the social
sciences (Simon 1955; de Solla Price 1976). This body of work eschews a detailed focus
on relationships among nodes within a network in favor of what Newman (2003, p. 168)
characterizes as the “consideration of large-scale statistical properties of graphs.” Tradition-
ally, scholars have concentrated on the study of random graphs, in which undirected ties
between nodes are created through a random process, so that the number of ties connected
to each node is distributed according to a binomial distribution (or Poisson distribution for
very large networks). However, many networks are not well represented by random graphs,
and appear to have very different distributions of ties.
This has important consequences for the political effects of the blogosphere. Different
distributions of ties among nodes will be associated with different forms and levels of polit-
ical effectiveness. In particular, as we seek to argue, the extent to which the distribution of
links is skewed will have key consequences for how the blogosphere affects politics.
More speciﬁcally, many networks appear to have skewed distribution in which most
nodes have a relatively small number of ties, but a small number of nodes have a dispro-
portionately large number of ties. In such networks, the best-connected nodes will have
a much greater number of ties than the less well connected. These skewed distributions
have become an important subject of investigation in recent years; they have been observed
across a variety of phenomena in the physical and social sciences, including word frequency
in the English language, movie star collaboration, scientiﬁc collaboration on papers, pro-
tein folding, and, most relevantly, web page links. For example, in power law distributions,
the probability that a particular node has degree k is a function of k−γ , where γ is a posi-
tive constant. Power law distributions are especially likely to be found in growing networks
where nodes that already have a large number of ties are more likely to receive incoming
ties from new nodes than nodes that have few such ties. In such networks, initial advan-
tages are self-reinforcing; nodes that are rich in ties are likely to become even richer over
time, generating a power law distribution of ties across nodes. Web pages are more likely to
link to other web pages that already have a relatively high number of links (Barabási 2000;
Adamic and Huberman 1999; Hindman et al. 2003) The lognormal distribution is also very

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
19
substantially skewed (Huberman 2002); while it is more often associated with multiplica-
tive processes than with models of network growth, Pennock et al. (2002) provide a modiﬁed
model of network growth, and report that the distribution of incoming links among subsets
of webpages of the same type is roughly similar to a lognormal distribution, suggesting that
the micro-structures of subject-speciﬁc segments of the WWW deviate in important ways
from its macro-structure. While “rich” sites are still likely to get “richer,” as in Barabási and
Albert’s model, “poor” sites too stand some chance of getting rich, if they are lucky.
Given the existing literature, we hypothesized that incoming links between political
blogs, like links between web pages more generally, would have a markedly skewed dis-
tribution. The blogosphere, like the WWW, evolves through an evolutionary process that
has some important features in common with Barabási and Albert’s model. New bloggers
are likely to add themselves to the network when they create links to other, existing blogs,
as a means of announcing their existence to the blogosphere (Blood 2002); one may rea-
sonably predict that they are more likely to create links to well established bloggers who
already have many inbound links, than to other unknowns. Previous research supports this
prediction. A power law distribution of blog-links was ﬁrst hypothesized by Shirky (2003),
Fig. 1 Skewedness of links in the blogosphere. Snapshot of the relationships between 4,543 blogs on October
18, 2003. Vertical axis: degree (number of incoming links); horizontal access, rank of blog in ecosystem

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
Fig. 2 Log-log relationship between P [K ≥ k] (vertical axis) and degree (horizontal axis)
who used data from the Blogosphere Ecosystem to examine whether there was a power-law
distribution of links among 433 blogs. Shirky found that the top dozen bloggers (less than
3% of the total examined) accounted for approximately 20% of the incoming links. A second
study by Jason Kottke, of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, found a power-law relationship,
with an R-squared of 0.99.
We conducted our own initial study, using data on incoming links from the Blogosphere
Ecosystem. Figure 1 ranks blogs in terms of their number of incoming links (the blog with
most incoming links being ranked ﬁrst, the blog with the second most being ranked second
and so on), and graphs this against the absolute number of incoming links for that blog.
This provides a quick and easy way to visualize the structure of the underlying network of
links among blogs. As can easily be seen, the graph supports the hypothesis that there is a
very substantial degree of skewedness in the distribution of incoming links among political
bloggers. There are a very few highly ranked blogs with many incoming links, followed by
a steep fall-off, and a very long “tail” of medium-to-low ranked bloggers with few or zero
incoming links.
Unlike Shirky and Kottke’s ﬁndings about the blogosphere in general, an inspection of
Figs. 2 and 3 and of the Maximum Likelihood Estimates for a Pareto and a lognormal dis-

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
21
Fig. 3 Fits to Pareto and
lognormal distributions
tribution, suggest that the distribution of political blogs is lognormal in nature. This result
may suggest that the political blogosphere is not driven by a pure “rich get richer” model
of network growth. However, Adamic and Glance (2005), drawing from a different data set,
suggest a closer ﬁt to a power-law model. This is an important avenue for future research.
In any event, the hypothesis that the distribution of links among blogs is substantially and
systematically skewed ﬁnds strong support in the data. This has important consequences for
the relationship between blogs and readers.
Total Log-likelihood
Lognormal distribution
−17218.22
Pareto distribution
−18481.51
3 How skewedness affects politics
How does a skewed distribution of links affect the relationship between blogs and politics?
With a few exceptions (Hindman et al. 2003; Cederman 2003), there has been remarkably
little study of the relationship between skewed distributions and politics. Building on a sug-
gestion ﬁrst made by Sugden (1995), we suggest that the existence of a skewed distribution
has important consequences for the respective salience of different blogs. Sugden argues
that actors in both mixed motive and pure coordination games may employ a collectively
rational decision rule to coordinate on mutually beneﬁcial equilibria. If players share com-
mon knowledge regarding the underlying distribution of a random variable, z and a labeling
procedure that attaches an ordered set of labels to each value of z, they may ﬁnd it easier
to coordinate in a matching game (where they need to coordinate on some value of z) if the
distribution of z is signiﬁcantly skewed. As Sugden observes, certain distributions provide

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
precisely the sort of skewedness that is likely to help actors resolve coordination problems.
Under such distributions, the decision rule of “choose the most frequently mentioned el-
ement of z” will be “collectively rational,” so that players may easily come to coordinate
on the most frequently mentioned value of z. Thus, power law or lognormal distributions
may create especially “attractive” focal points that will allow individuals to coordinate more
easily. Where actors must coordinate by choosing a particular value of a variable z, and z is
subject to a power law or lognormal distribution, then the most frequent value of z is likely
to be a focal point; it will be substantially more numerous than the second most frequent
value, and will consequently stand out from the distribution for all players. The second most
frequent value will similarly be more salient than the third.
Sugden’s arguments have clear implications for the relative salience of blogs. The skewed
distribution of links among blogs mean that only a few blogs are likely to become focal
points; those with very high numbers of links, or with some other characteristic that makes
them especially salient. Blogs that are focal points are likely to “stand out” in a very im-
portant way for actors who wish to solve coordination games. Here, we suggest that focal
point blogs offer both a means of ﬁltering ‘interesting’ blog posts out from “uninteresting”
ones, and furthermore provide an important coordination point that allows bloggers and blog
readers to coordinate on a mutually beneﬁcial equilibrium.
We argue that bloggers and readers face an important coordination problem, which may
be analyzed as a pure coordination game. The problem is as follows. Most bloggers wish
to maximize their readership, but face very substantial difﬁculties in gaining new readers.
Given the vast number of blogs even in the political subsection of the blogosphere, it is
extraordinarily hard for them to attract readers, even when they have something interesting
and unique to offer. Blog readers, for their part, want to ﬁnd interesting blog posts—in terms
of either new information or a compelling interpretation of old information. However, given
search costs and limited time, it is nearly impossible for readers to sift through the vast
amounts of available material in order to ﬁnd the interesting posts.
Blogs with large numbers of incoming links offer both a means of ﬁltering interesting
blog posts from less interesting ones, and a focal point at which bloggers with interesting
posts, and potential readers of these posts can coordinate. When less prominent bloggers
have an interesting piece of information or point of view that is relevant to a political con-
troversy, they will usually post this on their own blogs. However, they will also often have
an incentive to contact one of the large “focal point” blogs, to publicize their post. The lat-
ter may post on the issue with a hyperlink back to the original blog, if the story or point
of view is interesting enough, so that the originator of the piece of information receives
more readers. In this manner, bloggers with fewer links function as “ﬁre alarms” for focal
point blogs, providing new information and links. This reduces the need for bloggers at the
top of the link structure to engage in “police patrols” to gather information on their own
(McCubbins and Schwartz 1984). The skewed network structure of the blogosphere makes
it less costly for outside observers to acquire information from blogs. The networked struc-
ture of the blogosphere allows interesting arguments to make their way to the top of the
blogosphere. Because of the lognormal distribution of weblogs, the media only needs to
look at the top blogs to obtain a “summary statistic” about the distribution of opinions on
a given political issue. The mainstream political media—which some bloggers refer to as
the “mediasphere”—can therefore act as a transmission belt between the blogosphere and
politically powerful actors. Blogs therefore affect political debate by affecting the content
of media reportage and commentary about politics. Just as the media can provide a collec-
tive interpretive frame for politicians, blogs can create a menu of interpretive frames for the
media to appropriate.

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
23
This leads to another puzzle—why do members of the media read blogs? The next section
addresses this issue.
4 The mediasphere and the blogosphere
There is strong evidence that media elites—editors, publishers, reporters, and columnists—
consume political blogs. In Dautrich and Barnes (2005a, 2005b), a survey of 300 tele-
vision and media journalists, 83% reported having used blogs—in contrast to only 7%
of the general public—and 41% report that they use them at least once a week. Of
those who used blogs, 55% reported that they use them to support the work that they
do in writing news. These ﬁgures are supported by qualitative evidence provided by me-
dia elites. New York Times Managing Editor Bill Keller said in a November 2003 inter-
view (Kurtz 2003), “I look at the blogs . . . . Sometimes I read something on a blog that
makes me feel we screwed up.” Howard Kurtz regularly quotes elite bloggers in his Me-
dia Notes Extra feature for the Washington Post. Opinion columnists, including Michael
Barone, Walter Shapiro, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, have indi-
cated that blogs form a part of their information-gathering activities. Prominent political
reporters and editors at the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, ABC
News, New Yorker, Newsweek, and Time have made similar statements (Smolkin 2004;
Packer 2004).
Another indication of the connection between the political part of the blogosphere and
mediasphere has been the extent to which individuals operating in one setting have crossed
over into the other activity. The fact that many newspapers, networks, and magazines have
set up their own blogs is clear evidence that media institutions are conscious of the form.
Prominent commentators—such as Bruce Bartlett, Noam Chomsky, Gregg Easterbrook, and
Amitai Etzioni—have tried their hand at weblogs. As previously noted, bloggers have been
hired to provide content for mainstream media publications. In March 2004, The Wash-
ington Monthly hired Kevin Drum—whose CalPundit blog was attracting over 1.2 million
unique visits per month by February 2004—and transferred his blog to their web site. Slate
magazine transferred Mickey Kaus’ blog to its online site more than a year before that. As
discussed in the introductory article to this special issue, other political content providers
also publish blogs.
Why has the political media devoted so much attention to the blogosphere? The survey
evidence reported above suggests that it is not because blogs themselves provide a superior
source of news. Only 11% of those surveyed believed that blogs were an “excellent” or
“good” source of news, while 41% rated them as fair, and 31% as poor. Based on our own
experience as bloggers, our interactions with other bloggers and journalists, and the extant
literature on weblogs, we offer four reasons for the links between the mediasphere and the
blogosphere: material incentives, personal network ties, expertise, and speed.
Part of the growth in interest can be explained by material incentives. As media pub-
lications have divided their online content between free and paid material in an effort to
boost subscription revenues, they have simultaneously expanded their free content to main-
tain web trafﬁc. This free content has often taken the form of weblogs. For example, in early
2003 The New Republic decided to convert much of the online content that also appeared
in the print version of the magazine to subscription access only. Over the course of the en-
suing year, they simultaneously expanded their web content to include regular columns by
scholar-bloggers, as well as multiple weblogs from New Republic staffers.1
1Interviews with Noam Scheiber and Richard Just (online editors of The New Republic), 9 April 2004.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
Pre-existing social and professional ties between early bloggers and journalists also helps
to explain the attention paid to the blogosphere. The ﬁrst wave of political commentators to
enter the blogosphere consisted of journalists with close ties to mainstream media outlets.
Mickey Kaus wrote for The New Republic and Newsweek before starting kausﬁles.com.
Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic and was a regular columnist for The New York
Times Magazine prior to launching AndrewSullivan.com. Joshua Micah Marshall worked at
The American Prospect and freelanced for several other political magazines prior to starting
TalkingPointsMemo.com. From their beginning of their blogs, all three writers commanded
an impressive amount of links, trafﬁc, and media mentions.
These network ties between journalist-bloggers and those in the media were crucial to
establishing trust in the new medium. In encountering the blogosphere, journalists were con-
fronted with imperfect information regarding the accuracy of its participants. Markets with
imperfect information about producer quality often fail to emerge, due to consumer wari-
ness (Akerlof 1970). Social ties of kin or friendship can function to overcome fears of op-
portunism (Granovetter 1985; Greif 1993). Because many of the early political bloggers had
personal and professional ties to prominent journalists, columnists and editors, mainstream
media outlets deemed them as reliable sources for both information and opinion (Smolkin
2004). As Kaus, Sullivan, and Marshall linked to other bloggers, they signaled their belief
in the quality of other blogs—and that trust spread to key parts of the mediasphere.
Another reason for the increase in dynamic density between the blogosphere and the me-
diasphere has been the expertise that bloggers can provide on substantive issues. It is true
that blogs do not provide a good general source for news, and may suffer from important
biases (Ashlin and Ladle 2006). They may, however, offer speciﬁc informational resources
that are valuable to journalists. By deﬁnition, general interest intermediaries in the media
suffer a deﬁcit of specialized, detailed knowledge. Blogs can serve as repositories of what
Hayek (1945) labeled “local knowledge” for relevant policy issues or current event histo-
ries. Over time, reporters can rely on these blogs when the issue in question emerges as a
news topic again. Specialist blogs greatly reduce the search costs for journalists in acquiring
information on a developing story. Specialty bloggers that promote their posts on salient
topics have the potential to convert the information-gathering activities of “general interest”
bloggers and journalists from high-cost police patrols to low-cost ﬁre alarms (McCubbins
and Schwartz 1984).
Even specialized or trade publications rely on bloggers that specialize in the same topic.
For example, numerous staffers at legal trade journals stated that they relied on Howard
Bashman’s blog on appellate jurisdiction, “How Appealing” as a source for both breaking
legal news and for in-depth commentary on law and politics. A senior reporter from Ameri-
can Lawyer Media said that Bashman’s blog was her home page and that she checks out the
site “ﬁve or six times a day,” and that through Bashman’s blog, she was able to ﬁle one story
a day earlier than she otherwise would have.2 An editor at the American Bar Association’s
journal also relied on Bashman’s blog as a source for story ideas.3
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bloggers possess ﬁrst-mover advantages in formu-
lating opinions. The comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse is their low cost
of real-time publication. Immediately following an event of political consequence—a presi-
dential debate, a terrorist attack—bloggers have the ability to post their immediate reactions
2E-mail correspondence with Shannon P. Duffy, American Lawyer Media, 24 September 2003.
3Conﬁdential e-mail correspondence, 24 September 2003.

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
25
before other forms of media can respond. Beyond initial reactions, bloggers can also re-
spond to other blog reactions before the mainstream media has time to react. As Mickey
Kaus (2003) points out:
[T]he virtue of speed isn’t simply, or even primarily, that you can scoop the com-
petition. It’s that you can post something and provoke a quick response and counter-
response, as well as research by readers. The collective brain works faster, ﬁring with
more synapses. In theory, “faster” can mean “fast enough to have real-world conse-
quences” that print journalism or even edited Web journalism can’t have.
Another journalist (Rosenberg 2002) concurred, “The editorial process of the blogs takes
place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links.”
The rapidity of blogger interactions affects political communication in the mainstream
media through agenda setting and framing effects. The agenda-setting role is clear—if a
critical number of elite blogs raise a particular story, it can pique the interest of mainstream
media outlets.
Corporate actors have also noted the blogosphere’s collective ability to act as a leading
indicator of future news coverage. The Ford Motor Company’s director of public affairs
observed (Hargrave 2004), “The real value of searching the net, including blogs, is that you
get a live picture of what people are thinking about certain issues. It means that you can
predict if there is going to be an issue that’s going to grow and become something you need
to respond to before it gets to the mainstream press.”
These four factors, taken together, explain why journalists read blogs. They also provide
the beginnings of an explanation as to how blogs may inﬂuence journalists, and thus have
a wider impact on the public debate—through framing. Scholars of political communica-
tion (Nelson et al. 1997; Fan et al. 1998) argue that the media can elevate issues and devise
interpretive frames for them that shape the boundaries and content of political discourse
and public opinion. For complex issue areas, there are a plethora of possible debates and
cleavages that can take place. The media—consciously or unconsciously—can socially con-
struct focal points that frame the issue in a particular way. This frame serves to eliminate
dimensions from an issue, making the topic easier to comprehend for the mass public.
If the mainstream media constructs focal points through which political actors must op-
erate, the blogosphere has the capacity to construct focal points through which the media
operates. As former Washington Post journalist Thomas Edsall described it (Rosen 2004),
“We in journalism, there is an orthodoxy to our thinking. Blogs can . . . break the ice and
make it clear that there is something pretty strange or pretty unique or pretty interesting
or pretty awful about something . . . . They . . . open up a lot of doors.” The media will be
affected by that consensus in the same way that the mass public is affected by the media.
Even if the blogosphere fails to generate a substantive consensus on what an issue means,
they may still generate a consensus on whether an issue is interesting.
The skewed distribution of the blogosphere described in the previous section makes it
much easier for the media to pick up the collective beliefs of the blogosphere. Like gen-
eral readers, journalists who are interested in blogs have a clear interest in minimizing their
search costs. Because an overwhelming fraction of web trafﬁc and web links cluster around
the most popular political blogs, media representatives have a clear incentive to concen-
trate on those sites if they wish to garner evidence about the general state of opinion in the
blogosphere opinion. Thus, the top ﬁve or ten blogs can function as a summary statistic
for journalists. As described by Edsall, “if you just do a few of these [blogs], one advan-
tage is they link to each other so much, often if something is good, you’re going to ﬁnd out
about it.”

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
Table 2 Blogs read by the media
Blog author (blog title)
Number of
Number of
media readers
media mentions
Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish)
59
78
Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit)
43
11
Mickey Kaus (Kausﬁles)
23
16
National Review’s Corner
20
n/a
Joshua Micah Marshall (Talking Point Memo)
18
12
James Romenesko (Media News)
14
13
Atrios (Eschaton)
10
3
Daniel W. Drezner (danieldrezner.com)
9
3
Eugene Volokh (The Volokh Conspiracy)
7
8
Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing)
6
4
James Lileks (The Bleat)
6
1
Table 3 Blogs read by the elite media
Blogger (blog title)
Number of elite
Number of
media readers
media mentions
Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish)
22
78
Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit)
11
11
Mickey Kaus (Kausﬁles)
7
16
Joshua Micah Marshall (Talking Point Memo)
5
12
National Review’s Corner
4
n/a
Daniel W. Drezner (danieldrezner.com)
4
3
James Romenesko (Media News)
4
13
J. Bradford DeLong (Semi-Daily Journal)
3
4
Eugene Volokh (The Volokh Conspiracy)
3
8
Atrios (Eschaton)
2
3
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos)
2
4
Howard Bashman (How Appealing)
2
1
Respondents were coded as “elite” based on their employer. They included prominent newspapers (The New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor), news networks (ABC, CBS, CNN), wire ser-
vices (Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters), and prominent opinion magazines (The New Republic, Weekly
Standard, National Review, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs). Of the 140 respondents, 33 were from elite
outlets
These hypotheses receive tentative support from an online survey conducted by the au-
thors between September 2003 and January 2004, in which media employees were asked to
provide information about the blogs that they read. 140 editors, reporters, columnists and
publishers responded, ranging from “elite” media outlets like the New York Times and ABC
News to rural publications with less than 10,000 readers. Respondents were asked to name
up to three blogs that they read frequently. Collectively, over 125 blogs were cited by these
respondents as among the blogs that they read. However, the top ten blogs were responsible
for more than 54% of all the citations. Among “elite” media respondents, the skewness was

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
27
even more pronounced. The top ten blogs were responsible for over 74% of the citations;
the top ﬁve alone were responsible for more than 56% of the mentions. Consistent with the
argument made previously about network ties, Sullivan, Kaus, and Marshall were among the
top ﬁve blogs for both categories.
We caution that these ﬁndings are only indicative—our sample was very likely unrep-
resentative. Journalists were solicited to respond through announcements on a variety of
political blogsites leading to an obvious risk of sample bias. We have tried to minimize this
bias by publicizing the survey on both highly linked and less highly linked blogs, that were
situated on both the left and right of the political spectrum, but do not claim by any means
to have eliminated it. The number of respondents was too small to allow us to gather statis-
tically signiﬁcant results for most interesting potential empirical relationships. Nonetheless,
they do at least provide an initial mapping of the relevant empirical relationships that may
serve to generate hypotheses to be tested in future research. Furthermore, a Nexis search
was conducted of mainstream media mentions of top blogs/bloggers during the same time
period as the survey was conducted (see Tables 2 and 3). The data provides an external va-
lidity check of the survey results; the number of media mentions is strongly correlated with
the number of media readers of a particular blog (for the top ten bloggers, the correlation
coefﬁcient is 0.84 for the general media survey, and 0.94 in the elite media survey).
5 The constraints on blog inﬂuence
The previous section delineated some important causal mechanisms through which the blo-
gosphere can inﬂuence American politics. However, even if the blogosphere can inﬂuence
the body politic, the extent of that inﬂuence remains open to question. Although the blo-
gosphere possesses the twin comparative advantages of speed and expertise, it lacks many
other assets useful in politics.
There are two important constraints on the blogosphere inﬂuence. The ﬁrst is the fact
that all bloggers—even those at the top of the hierarchy—have limited resources and time
at their disposal. Indeed, some bloggers complain of “burnout” and have given up blogging
altogether. Although some elite bloggers can earn a living wage through advertising and
other revenue streams, by and large blogging remains a largely voluntary activity. The mon-
etary compensation involved provides only limited resources for wide-ranging investigative
journalism. Because of these resource constraints, it is simply impossible for top bloggers
to be able to comment on or link to news stories about every issue up for political debate.
For example, one of the most prominent bloggers in terms of links and trafﬁc is Glenn
Reynolds’ InstaPundit. One reason for his high ranking is his proliﬁc output; in his ﬁrst three
years, he published more than 16,000 blog posts on a welter of topics. However, Reynolds’
is also a full-time law professor at the University of Tennessee. He wrote repeatedly that
readers should not assume that he will be either able or willing to blog about all topics under
the sun. In October 2003, Reynolds (2003) wrote:
I don’t have much trouble resisting people’s efforts to bully me into advancing
their agendas. What worries me more, in a way, are the friendly emails from people
saying that they get all their news from InstaPundit.
Don’t do that! It’s “InstaPundit,” not “InstaNews Service.” And this is . . . an ama-
teur activity. I don’t even get to blog all the stuff that interests me . . . much less stuff
that’s important, but that doesn’t interest me.

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Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
What you get here—as with any blog—is my idiosyncratic selection of things
that interest me, as I have time to note them, with my own idiosyncratic comments.
What’s more, to the (large) extent that it’s shaped by my effort to play up stories that
Big Media are ignoring, it’s even more idiosyncratic. I hope you like it, but making it
your sole source of news is probably not a good idea.
The second constraint is that powerful actors in politics and political communications
have already moved down the learning curve in response to weblogs. Astute political actors
can read blogs as easily as media professionals, and use that information to predict the
direction of future news cycles. This also gives them the ability to develop strategies to
counter or blunt the inﬂuence of blogs before media groundswells develop.
For example, consider the 2003 episode involving Rick Santorum, who was chairman of
the GOP conference in the Senate and third in his party’s leadership structure. Less than
six months after Trent Lott resigned, Santorum gave an interview to an Associated Press re-
porter in which he explicitly equated homosexuality with bestiality. This prompted condem-
nation from across the political spectrum of the blogosphere, including repeated mentions
by top-tier bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Joshua Micah Mar-
shall. However, Santorum was not asked to resign his leadership position. President Bush
intervened at an early stage of the news cycle to issue a statement expressing support for
Santorum. The statement simultaneously made it clear that this was because his interpre-
tation of Santorum’s statement was more benign than other interpretations. By creating an
alternative framing of the issues at an early stage, political elites were able to blunt criticism
from bloggers far more successfully than in the Trent Lott case.
We predict that as blogs become a more established feature on the political landscape,
politicians and other interested parties will become more adept at responding to them, and,
where they believe it necessary, co-opting them. To the extent that blogs become more po-
litically inﬂuential, we may expect them to become more directly integrated into “politics
as usual,” losing some of their ﬂavor of novelty and immediacy in the process. During the
2004 Presidential elections, both major parties chose to credential some bloggers as jour-
nalists for their nominating conventions. During the 2004 electoral cycle, left-wing blogger
Markos Zuniga provided consultancy services for the Democratic campaign, while another
prominent pro-Democrat blogger, Duncan Black, became a senior fellow at Media Matters,
a left wing non proﬁt organization. Both of these bloggers disclosed their afﬁliations at the
time; the same was not true of two South Dakotan bloggers who received substantial pay-
ments from John Thune’s campaign to unseat Tom Daschle. Thune’s success in using blogs
and websites to support his campaign has generated considerable interest from other politi-
cians. During the 2006 electoral cycle, prominent individual bloggers and campaigns were
even more enmeshed. If the FEC continues to be reluctant to regulate blogs and bloggers we
may possibly see a proliferation of “Astroturf” blogs in future political campaigns.
6 Conclusions
In this paper, we have sought to provide an answer to a perplexing question for political
scientists—why do blogs sometimes have real political consequences, given the relatively
low number of blog readers in the overall population? Our proposed answer to this question
is that blogs may frame political debates and create focal points for the media as a whole.
While blog exposure was limited to only 7% of the general population, over 83% of journal-
ists had used blogs, and 43% of journalists used them at least every week. Because opinion-
makers within the media take blogs seriously, the latter can have a much wider impact on

Public Choice (2008) 134: 15–30
29
politics. In setting out this answer, we have advanced arguments about why the media takes
account of blogs, as well as some tentative arguments regarding the wider consequences of
blogs for the broad contours of debate over U.S. politics. Finally, we have provided some
important empirical evidence regarding the structure of the political blogosphere, and how
this structure makes certain blogs much more salient than others.
Our ﬁndings are a beginning, not an end. The political consequences of blogs are unlikely
to be limited to the particular mechanisms that we have explored. Fortunately for political
scientists, blogs provide a uniquely rich set of data that can be exploited in order to explore
a variety of research questions. Important research remains to be done, for example, on
the consequences of blogs for political mobilization, and for fund raising. Political debates
within the blogosphere provide important evidence that is relevant to current debates about
democratic deliberation.
As we have suggested in the penultimate section of this article, there are important limits
to the political inﬂuence of blogs. They are important less because of their direct effects on
politics than their indirect ones—they inﬂuence important actors within mainstream media
who in turn frame issues for a wider public. We see no reasons to expect that this will
change in the immediate future. We also expect blogs to lose some of their disruptive impact
as politicians and others learn to take better account of them. However, by the same token we
predict political blogs will become an increasingly pervasive tool through which politicians
and others will seek to inﬂuence political debate.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Bethany Albertson, Kevin Drum, Eszter Hargittai, Jacob T. Levy,
Laura McKenna, Cosma Shalizi, and Cass Sunstein for their comments and suggestions. Cosma Shalizi both
suggested and carried out the MLE tests of the Pareto and loglinear models described in the article. We are
also grateful to the anonymous “N.Z. Bear” for providing us with access to his dataset on blog links, and Tom
Runnacles for technical help. Amanda Butler provided valuable research assistance during the drafting of this
article.
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Document Outline

The power and politics of blogs