{"id":2252,"date":"2008-02-08T12:07:07","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T12:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/08\/crosslinking-and-statistics\/"},"modified":"2008-02-08T12:07:07","modified_gmt":"2008-02-08T12:07:07","slug":"crosslinking-and-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/08\/crosslinking-and-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Cross-Linking and Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry Farrell is doing some substantive political science blogging<\/a> over at the Monkey Cage, looking at a paper by his co-blogger Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues<\/a>. They did a really imprssive amount of work to look at the linking habits of liberal and conservative bloggers, and Henry zeroes in on one of the findings in particular:<\/p>\n

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Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. …Posts that concretely address the content of a blog entry from an ideological opponent represent about a quarter (26%) of all conservative and about one fifth (21%) of all liberal posts with cross-ideological links. Substantive disagreement accounted for 12% of links from conservative to liberal blogs and 16% of links from liberals to conservatives, while substantive agreement accounted for 14% of links from conservatives to liberals and 5% of pointers from liberals to conservatives.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Henry offers four possible explanations, two of which might be characterized as straw man arguments on behalf of the different sides, which I guess reveals him as a liberal… I’d like to suggest a fifth explanation:<\/p>\n

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5) You’re overthinking this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The sample size here is ridiculously small– a total of 63 liberal-to-conservative links, and 42 conservative-to-liberal links. The 11% difference between the linking habits of the two groups looks big, but you’d expect an uncertainty of about 13% in the L-to-C number, and 15% in the C-to-L number. That’s toward the outside of the “statistical fluctuation” range, but it’s not a difference I would trust in any way.<\/p>\n

It looks even less believable to me looking at the raw data. They tallied links from twenty conservative and twenty liberal blogs for three weeks, and then read and characterized the cross-links between them. The straw man fractions for the individual weeks look like this:<\/p>\n

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June 2004<\/b> C-to-L: 2\/6 L-to-C: 3\/13<\/p>\n

October 2004<\/b> C-to-L: 11\/22 L-to-C: 17\/23<\/p>\n

March 2005<\/b> C-to-L: 5\/14 L-to-C: 14\/27<\/p>\n

Total<\/b> C-to-L: 18\/42 L-to-C: 34\/63<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These are really small numbers. More importantly, one of the three weeks of data accounts for better than 50% of the difference between the total numbers of “straw man” posts. There’s a big ideological difference in the total number of posts that week, as well, with 27 cross-linking posts by liberals, and only 14 by conservatives.<\/p>\n

While the week of March 13-19, 2005 is described as “a week without any special political events” in the paper, it sure looks like something happened that week that got the liberal blogosphere riled up. The total number of links regardless of ideology is higher for the liberal blogs as well– 173 to 150 for that week– which further suggests some agitation on the liberal side.<\/p>\n

In short, I’m not really convinced it’s necessary to go to any great effort to explain this discrepancy. It’s interesting trivia, but looking at the numbers, I’m not convinced it isn’t just noise.<\/p>\n

Of course, the methods described in the paper sound like so much work that I doubt we’ll see this repeated any time soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Farrell is doing some substantive political science blogging over at the Monkey Cage, looking at a paper by his co-blogger Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues. They did a really imprssive amount of work to look at the linking habits of liberal and conservative bloggers, and Henry zeroes in on one of the findings in… Continue reading Cross-Linking and Statistics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}