gatewatching

Andrew Norton has written about the Australia Election Survey’s findings about who reads political blogs.

It’s the raw numbers that make you stop and think. Although the proportion of the sample who had read a political blog doubled between 2004 and 2007, that still only amounted to 2.7% of the sample. To put that in perspective, it’s a little less than the proportion of South Australians who voted for Family First in the 2007 Senate Election (2.89%), and far less than the proportion of my fellow Queenslanders who decided to vote for Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party in the Senate (4.2%).

I guess that conversations about influence, even if they are proposals to use two-step models to talk about the blogosphere’s influence, really need to account for survey findings like this.

There are some more useful tidbits in Norton’s post about the characteristics of blog readers (along with caveats about generalising too much from what ends up being a pretty small group of respondents).

30%… had done some work for a party or candidate. Only 25% voted Liberal in 2007 (slightly below the proportion who gave their party ID as Liberal). Many of the others were serious Howard haters, with more than half the sample rating their feelings about John Howard at 1 or 2 on a scale that ran from 1 ‘Strongly dislike’ to 10 ‘Strongly like’. They were more than twice as likely to feel that way about the former PM than the sample as a whole. By contrast, no readers of political blogs seriously disliked Rudd, compared to about 8% of the sample as a whole.

So, politically active, strongly left-leaning, and very predisposed to disliking Howard. (I wonder how much wanting to see Howard go down was a stimulus to consuming more of all forms of political information for some people during the last campaign.)

Also, Norton reports that they tended to be younger (with a quarter born in the 1980s), more likely to have attended a private school, and relatively balanced in terms of gender.

blogging, readership, surveys Andrew Norton, blogging, influence, readership, statistics, surveys