by WonkoKevin

In the first two posts, the conclusion to this question was: you bet.  Political blogs can create and rapidly diffuse stories and opinion in a way that MSM cannot.  Now let me turn the question around a bit, and ask: Are political bloggers predictive?

Everett Rogers was one of our great American thinkers, and his classic book “Diffusion of Innovations” is the bible concerning how both tangible innovations (like a product) and intangible innovations (like an idea) diffuse in a society.  He identified that there are different “types” of people per when they adopt: first innovators adopt, then early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally laggards.  In his theory, early adopters are the most important group in terms of the likelihood of broad difussion, as they take the bold ideas from the innovators and mold them for adoption by the pragmatic early majority.

In a political context, the innovation in Roger’s model is ideology, political bloggers are both innovators and early adopters, primary voters are the early majority, and swing voters are the late majority.

Will bloggers vote in the same way that the general populace does?  According to Roger’s theory, the answer would be yes.  As people at the front-end of the adoption curve, bloggers have to “adopt” before the general populace does.  Not all bloggers adopt the same idea–as ideological leaders, their views are going to tend to be more intense and diverse, and more ideological and less pragmatic.  Nevertheless, bloggers in the aggregate will tend to move ahead of the curve and thus be predictive. 

Imagine a funnel of political ideas.  At the front-end of the funnel, many ideas exist in the ideological soup.  Bloggers who are innovators, and the political campaigns, create these innovations, and bloggers who are early adopters select and shape those ideological innovations in such a way that they are attractive to the early majority, i.e. the primary voter.  So you bet political bloggers make a difference!

I think this is especially true if we lay aside the day-to-day variations and examine where blogger opinion is moving week-to-week and month-to-month.  In upcoming blogs, we’ll be presenting data from Wonkosphere concerning the candidates’ buzz share performance in August, and there are some very interesting patterns that may be tell-tale of polling to come.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 6:09 am and is filed under Politics 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.