Forging Bonds and Burning Bridges

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14553834
• Author: Allyson Blackwell,Elizabeth Suhay,Cameron Roche,Lucien Bruggeman
• Date: 01 July 2015
• Published date: 01 July 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2015, Vol. 43(4)643 –679

© The Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14553834

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Article

Forging Bonds and

Burning Bridges:

Polarization and Incivility

in Blog Discussions

About Occupy Wall

Street

Elizabeth Suhay1, Allyson Blackwell2,

Cameron Roche3, and Lucien Bruggeman4

Abstract

Putnam warned over a decade ago that the urge to associate with similar

others online may lead to “cyberbalkanization,” fostering bonding capital

at the expense of bridging capital. This study examines balkanization with

respect to political blogs, investigating to what extent opinions in posts

and comment sections on blogs associated with the left and right are

ideologically polarized. We also investigate whether extreme opinions tend

to co-occur with uncivil discourse aimed at political opponents. Finally,

this study compares political blogs with a newer information source that

bridges the gap between old and new media—newspaper blogs—asking

whether polarization and incivility are reduced on that platform. A content

analysis was conducted of blog discussions about a salient political event—

Occupy Wall Street. In both posts and comments, political blogs were highly

1American University, Washington, DC, USA

2Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

3University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

4ABC News, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Elizabeth Suhay, Department of Government, School of Public Affairs, American University,

4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA.

Email: suhay@american.edu

553834APRXXX10.1177/1532673X14553834American Politics ResearchSuhay et al.

research-article2014

644 American Politics Research 43(4)

polarized and opinion extremity and incivility were correlated. However,

content on newspaper blogs was largely unpolarized and civil.

Keywords

political communication, new media, political blogs, polarization, incivility

The Koch’s and the folks down at the Chamber of Commerce along with every

Republican strategist on the payroll must be shitting their pants at what a real

grass roots movement looks like.

Firedoglake blog comment (October 16, 2011)

Liberals love mob movements because you can’t get mobs to think, which is

perfect for Democratic ideas.

Townhall blog post (October 19, 2011)

Around the turn of the millennium, Robert Putnam (1995, 2000) famously

documented, and bemoaned, declining levels of social capital in the United

States. Americans were leaving voluntary organizations in droves, often

replacing those hours spent socializing with relatively solitary activities, such

as watching television. Yet, recognizing the complexity of our society,

Putnam rightly pointed out certain exceptions to declining social capital. In

particular, the Internet—very much nascent at the time—offered promise.

Putnam (2000) wrote, “Social capital is about networks, and the Net is the

network to end all networks” (p. 171).

However, Putnam also cautioned that there may be a dark side to the

Internet. In particular, he warned of “cyberbalkanization,” in which individu-

als confined their Internet communication to people who precisely shared

their interests and values (Putnam, 2000, p. 172). Such virtual communities

might encourage “bonding capital”—an inward-looking strengthening of ties

within exclusive, homogeneous groups—but they likely discouraged “bridg-

ing capital”—an outward-looking strengthening of ties across diverse social

cleavages.1 In this article, we consider the question, “As the Internet has

grown in size, complexity, and importance since Bowling Alone, have

Putnam’s concerns regarding balkanization and its effects on bridging capital

come to fruition?” We suggest the answer is “yes,” perhaps especially with

respect to political blogs.

Given some ambiguity in the literature as to what precisely constitutes a

political blog, let us take a moment at the outset to define them. Political

Suhay et al. 645

blogs are web pages hosted by individuals or multi-author groups that pro-

vide frequently updated personal commentary (usually in lieu of original

reporting) on political matters, normally posted in reverse chronological

order (Hindman, 2009; Lawrence, Sides, & Farrell, 2010). An important fea-

ture of political blogs is their interactive nature, marked by many hyperlinked

connections to other blogs and media content as well as reader participation

in the comment section (Perlmutter, 2008). Echoing Putnam, Perlmutter goes

so far as to refer to blogs as “voluntary associations.”

As time has passed since their introduction, political blogs have lost some

of their distinctiveness in two key ways. First, many “old media” news orga-

nizations (such as The New York Times and CNN) have incorporated blogs

into their online presence. One innovation of this study is its investigation of

blogs associated with legacy newspapers. Note however that, though we do

not deny such entities the title of “blog,” we do think it is useful to differenti-

ate them from conventional political blogs, which are independent of old

media. We use the terms political blog for the latter category and newspaper

blog for the former. We say more about how newspaper blogs appear to differ

from political blogs in our literature review. Second, many political websites

have adopted “bloggish” attributes; for example, comment sections and

hyperlinks are increasingly a part of online news stories.2 We would argue

that the increasingly blog-like nature of these entities only increases the rel-

evance of our study, as the patterns we identify in blogs may increasingly

pervade the online news environment.

In this article, we contribute to the literature in two key ways. First, previ-

ous research has documented the political polarization3 of political blogs pri-

marily by focusing on their linking patterns (Adamic & Glance, 2005;

Hargittai, Gallo, & Kane, 2008). We add to this existing literature by provid-

ing an analysis of ideological biases in political opinions expressed on blogs.

To do so, we analyze blog posts and reader comments on five political blogs

that focused on one of the most discussed political events of 2011: the Occupy

Wall Street (OWS) movement. As we describe in the Methodology section,

this particular case study is especially useful for our purposes due to both its

novelty and the amount of media coverage it received. Second, scholars have

documented great incivility on political blogs as compared with other types

of media (Sobieraj & Berry, 2011). Common wisdom attributes this tendency

to the anonymous and virtual (as opposed to face-to-face) aspects of political

blogs and other participatory websites (e.g., see Davis, 2009). We argue here

that, though anonymous and virtual communication may play a role in

encouraging incivility, incivility online likely also stems from partisan

extremity. To test this hypothesis, we use our blog data on the OWS move-

ment to conduct, to our knowledge, the first microanalysis of the link between