Blog Evolution
Social Security reform. Dan Rather. Harriet Miers. What do these things have in common? They were all derailed by blogs. Beltway Blogroll runs a great story (that appeared first in National Journal – MSM beat the blogs on this one) on numerous instances where blogs drove the evolution of an political issue.
There is a theory called “issue evolution” developed in the book (appropriatedly titled) “Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics” by political scientists Edwin Carmines and James Stimson. While the book focuses on how racial issues developed from 1964 onward, the underlying theory is very relevant to the role of blogs today.
Writing before the advent of the Internet, Carmines and Stimson examine how issues grow over time, gain understanding by political party elites, find champions, and finally led to public policy changes or political realignments. While blogs have not yet caused seismic shifts in the political parties, they have accelerated the issue process exponentially.
Bloggers today influence elections, legislation, nominations, product sales, etc. There is a “Blog Issue Evolution” process that now needs to be studied and understood. We know about blogstorms. We know how blogs are getting out in front of the MSM with increasing frequency. Now we have to develop some metrics. Is ten blog posts enough to start the issue evolution process? One hundred? We’re learning as we go. The fun part is that so many important things are happening via blogs as we learn.
It seems to me that the blog issue evolution process works well for short term issues. It will be interesting to look back in several years to see how blogs affected the larger, long term issues. Carmines and Stimson tracked racial issues over decades. Right now, we’re tracking blog issues over days or even hours.