Kevin Wallsten

Yes We Can: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon

ABSTRACT “Viral videos”—online video clips that gain widespread popularity when they are passed from person to person via e-mail, instant messages, and media-sharing Web sites—can exert a strong influence on election campaigns. Unfortunately, there has been almost no systematic empirical research on the factors that lead viral videos to spread across the Internet and permeate into the dominant political discourse. This article provides an initial assessment of the complex relationships that drive viral political videos by examining the interplay between audience size, blog discussion, campaign statements, and mainstream media coverage of the most popular online political video of the 2008 campaign—will.i.ams “Yes We Can” music video. Using vector autoregression, I find strong evidence that the relationship between these variables is complex and multidirectional. More specifically, I argue that bloggers and members of the Obama campaign played crucial roles in convincing people to watch the video and in attracting media coverage, while journalists had little influence on the levels of online viewership, blog discussion, or campaign support. Bloggers and campaign members, in other words, seem to occupy a unique and influential position in determining whether an online political video goes viral.

Political Blogs: Transmission Belts, Soapboxes, Mobilizers, or Conversation Starters?

ABSTRACT This paper makes an initial attempt to situate political blogging alongside other forms of political participation by asking the question: how do political bloggers actually use their blogs? More specifically, this paper relies on a detailed content analysis of 5,000 less popular and 5,000 A‐list political blog posts over the course of the 2004 campaign in order to determine whether political bloggers use their blogs primarily as “soapboxes,” “transmission belts,” “mobilizers,” or “conversation starters.” The results presented here suggest that although political blogs are used to make opinion statements far more often than they are used to mobilize political action, to request feedback from readers, or to pass along information produced by others, blog use changes significantly in response to key political events. To be more precise, less popular political bloggers were significantly more likely to mobilize political action on Election Day, and all bloggers—regardless of popularity—showed a greater propensity to seek feedback from their readers on the days of the presidential debates and in the weeks immediately following the election. Political blogging, in short, is a complex form of political participation that blends hypertext links, opinionated commentary, calls to political action, and requests for feedback in different ways at different moments in time.

Many Sources, One Message: Political Blog Links to Online Videos During the 2008 Campaign

Political bloggers occupy a unique and influential position in determining whether an online political video attracts attention from Internet users, journalists, and politicians. Despite the central role that bloggers play in the process of filtering online videos, however, there have been no systematic empirical studies of the kinds of videos that political bloggers choose to link to on their blogs. Using the data derived from 100 randomly selected political blogs during the last 2 months of the 2008 campaign, this article presents evidence that political bloggers are willing to post videos produced by a diverse array of sources, ranging from highly polished advertisements filmed by interest groups to footage recorded by ordinary citizens using cell phone cameras. Perhaps more importantly, the author finds strong support for the hypothesis that political bloggers will avoid posting videos that challenge their ideological predispositions and, instead, link only to those videos that confirm what they already believe to be true. More specifically, the data presented here show that political bloggers rarely engage in cross-ideological linking and have a strong preference for videos that disparage the actions and statements of their highest-profile political opponents. Political bloggers, in other words, engage in the type of ideologically motivated filtering of online videos that presents readers with a decidedly one-sided and negative view of those who do not share their political beliefs.

Race, partisanship, and perceptions of inter-minority commonality

ABSTRACT Feelings of commonality are central to the formation of multiracial political coalitions. Despite a fairly voluminous literature on where these feelings come from, however, relatively little is known about how elite messages influence individual-level perceptions of intergroup relations. This oversight is surprising given that so-called “elite opinion” theory has become “virtually orthodoxy” within political science. In order to explore the potential for opinion leadership on perceptions of commonality, this paper employs a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Testing hypotheses derived from elite opinion theory, this paper finds that no one interpretation of elite opinion theory can fully account for perceptions of commonality across racial groups. Scholars of race and ethnic politics would do well in the future, therefore, to acknowledge the complex ways that racial and partisan characteristics condition an individual’s response to elite messages.

Prejudice or Principled Conservatism? Racial Resentment and White Opinion toward Paying College Athletes:

Despite its widespread use in studies of race and ethnic politics, there exists a long-standing debate about whether racial resentment primarily measures antiblack prejudice or ideological conservatism. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this debate by examining racial resentment’s role in shaping white opinion on a “racialized” policy issue that involves no federal action and no government redistribution of resources: “pay for play” in college athletics. Using cross-sectional and experimental data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we find evidence not only that racial resentment items tap racial predispositions but also that whites rely on these predispositions when forming and expressing their views on paying college athletes. More specifically, we demonstrate that racially resentful whites who were subtly primed to think about African Americans are more likely to express opposition to paying college athletes when compared with similarly resentful whites who were primed to think about whites. Because free-market conservatism, resistance to changes in the status quo, opposition to expanding federal power, and reluctance to endorse government redistributive policies cannot possibly explain these results, we conclude that racial resentment is a valid measure of antiblack prejudice.