Now, in June 2008, after the major party candidates have been selected via the long primary season, we again probe the predictive patterns of political polemics. Obama says we are one nation -- not divided into blue and red. McCain proclaims his purple "maverick" roots [purple is mix of blue and red]. What does the book data tell us?
In the network maps, two books are connected if Amazon reports that they were frequently bought together or by the same person. I don't arrange, nor color the nodes before feeding the also-bought data through the InFlow software. The software has an algorithm that arranges the layout of the nodes based on each node's connections, both direct and indirect. Once the software finds the emergent pattern, and any clusters, I review the books in those groups and then see whether they are blue, red or purple.
Once the map was completed, I ran InFlow's network metrics to see which book(s) were most influential in June 2008. Not surprisingly, McClellan's What Happened came out on top, followed closely by Zakaria's The Post-American World.
The purple books [neither Right nor Left] were hard to distinguish this time. According to the network layout algorithm, they are closely integrated with the blues [Left]. Some of the books that ended up purple were surprising. George Will and Patrick Buchanan are outspoken conservatives, I expected them to show up in the red cluster. Maybe this reflects the split we have seen on the Right between the "old conservatives" and the "neo-cons"? The buying data shows that the old conservatives have more overlap with the progressives than they do with the neo-cons! Even Ron Paul's and Jesse Ventura's books link more with the blue than with the red.
Is the country moving from slightly right of center to slightly left of center?
Update: After viewing the network, Micah Sifry @ Personal Democracy Forum, revealed that he sees a simple pattern -- the map shows who is for the Iraq War and who is against. The red authors & readers are for the war, while the blue & purple authors & readers are against the Iraq War.
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2 comments:
What is your book buying pattern? And btw this is fascinating stuff. I tend to watch interviews with authors on CSPAN (and I used to watch Tim Russert's interviews as well). This is how I wound up with The Strong Man a bio of John Mitchell written by a republican who toiled about 18 yrs to write it. Would someone buy the book because they are republican or because they disliked the Watergate crew? I tend to try to buy books that might go against the grain of my personal philosophy as well, other wise I just feel like I'm not learning anything. How does this kind of philosophy fit into the demographics? Just curious. And I love your other posts too, ty to The Carnival for helping me find you.
Wrt to Micah Sifry's observation - I totally agree, but I think there's maybe a bit more cohesion to the purple cluster than he's implying. Specifically, the blue-red divide is a divide between people who think foreign spending is for the benefit of the poor (blue) and the benefit of the nation (red). It's a divide on how self-interested foreign policy should be. The purples agree with the reds on first principles (foreign policy should be primarily in the national interest), but they additionally have a caveat against meddling. So - purple means the US should act in its interests abroad narrowly defined, red means the US should act in its interests abroad broadly defined, and blue means the US should take a global approach.
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