University of Chicago Political Science Professor and blogger Daniel Drezner is making available his new paper "The Power and Politics of Blogs." Go here. There is a ton of great info, but one of the main points is how certain big blogs can drive a story or bring attention to a problem. The two biggest, as most people know and as Drezner's research confirms, are University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds Instapundit blog and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan's blog. In the case of the Dakota Blog Alliance and the Argus Leader, the many links from Reynolds' and Sullivan brought widespread attention to Argus Leader situation, as did significant attention and commentary from major blogs like Powerline and Hugh Hewitt. This experience seems to confirm Drezner's argument. Drezner's paper also cites an article I hadn't seen before in Polity, the academic journal published by the Northeastern Political Science Association. I refer to an article by Bruce Bimber, a political science professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, entitled "The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism," Polity vol. XXXI, no. 1 (Fall 1998). Although pre-dating the blog boom, Bimber notes much of the scholarly literature discussing how the internet can help the downtrodden overcome entrenched power. Lawrence Grossman's book The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age (NY, Viking, 1995) lists as one of "big losers" in the internet age the "commentators and correspondents in the mainstream press." Bimber also notes the populist view that in this new age "citizens will be less dependent on news organizations" and that "by increasing communication capacity, the Net will increase citizen influence on politics and decrease the influence of traditional political intermediaries who now dominate political communication." One can only hope. It's worth noting, as I did in a recent talk, that South Dakota was the birthplace of Populism in the late nineteenth century as citizens revolted against monopoly (SD was the first state to form a Populist Party). Populists used picnics and pamphlets to spread the word while the alliance is using blogs.
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