Henry Farrell says today that self-reported ideology is pretty unreliable when it comes to blog readers:
Netroots blog readers may identify themselves as being a mixed bag of ideologies….But self-identification here is misleading, as we can see if we look at a scale measuring blogreaders’ attitudes to a number of hot-button political issues such as abortion and the Iraq war, where left and right disagreed strongly at the time the data was gathered.
….Here, we don’t see anything like an even spread between those who are strongly liberal (i.e. inclined to take the ‘liberal’ position on all of these issues), and those who are moderate liberals or centrists. Instead, left blog readers tend to clump heavily at the strongly liberal end of the spectrum, with pretty well no centrists worth talking about.
The same thing is true for conservative blog readers. I don’t find this surprising, but I think a caveat is in order. The issue scale is apparently based on a survey of only five questions (“partial-birth” abortions, funding for stem cell research, withdrawing troops from Iraq, raising the minimum wage, and extending capital gains tax cuts), and this doesn’t allow for much nuance. For example, there’s not much question that I’m further toward the center than, say, Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher, but on this scale we’d all come out identically as raging communists with perfect 5-0 liberal scores. I think you’d need to dig quite a bit deeper than this to get decent read on the real views of the blogreading public.
