Getting Blogged Down: Tracing Illiberal Political Thought through Blogs

• In Event: Cross-Platform Approaches to Online Harms

Abstract

How do illiberal movements become popularized and part of the mainstream media? We argue that blogs play an important role in this popularization. Specifically, we gather text data from prominent political blogs between 2002 and 2016—an earlier starting point than previous researchers have used—and conduct text analysis in order to trace the key terms within this “illiberal blogs” corpus. We use a structural topic model to examine the variation in themes and language used by the blogs during this period. Our findings foreshadow similar trends in media and the speech of Republican political elites. Our results suggest that these blogs serve an important function as a testing ground for stories, framing, and messaging for the broader illiberalism movement, with implications for the development and success of insurgent forces within the contemporary Republican party.

Authors

• Galen Michael Sheely, University of Virginia

• Sam Koreman, University of Virginia

• Lauren Van De Hey