[UW Study] Tea Party out of step with conservative mainstream

there are about a billion stupid assumptions in this study.

 

Tea Party's just another word for nothing left to lose....

 

"Me and Bobby McMark"

 

Would you care to list some of the problems you have with the study? That would be more helpful at facilitating discussion than just calling it stupid and leaving it at that.

 

For starters, using # of articles on something is not really a good measure of anything. The National Review is not going to post articles about "patriotism" or "taking back the country" because it's just not what they do. That doesn't really reflect on whether or not writers at the National Review care about patriotism, and it reflects even less on whether mainstream conservatives are focused on it. The two groups weren't even measured using the same categories (36% of the National Review articles were about foreign policy, which was not even a category in the Tea Party survey). Similarly, they weren't even looked at during the same time frames - the National Review analysis was from 2009.

The National Review focuses a lot of its content on the details of government policy and on relevant stories coming out of Washington and from Washington politicians. So it's automatically going to focus more on things like that and less on more nebulous things like patriotism and conspiracy theories. It's just the nature of the website. I don't think you can take the content of articles at the National Review and trun that into a proxy for what the importance is of various views to conservatives.

Even the study itself suggests that their measure of what's on Tea Party websites doesn't match what appears be the primary focus of Tea Partiers:

Differences in content emerge when comparing the content from official tea party websites to the content from the National Review online, a mainstream conservative commentary. Only fourteen percent of the content from tea party websites focuses on big government or states rights, issues which are supposedly the ultimate concern of the tea party. This is compared to thirty-nine percent of the content examined from the National Review online.

What are we supposed to make of this? That Tea Partiers don't care about the primary issue that Tea Party cares about? Or that % of articles is a terrible measure of how important something is to a group?

There are plenty of surveys that compare Tea Partiers' stances on issues and Republicans' stances on issues and then line up extremely well. I think that's more of a measure of how the two groups compare/contrast/overlap.

 

why should we trust that the national review is an accurate depiction of "mainstream" conservatism? i mean, how could you even know? i don't doubt the results of the study, but it does seem a bit arbitrary...

 

Very good point - I can't tell from the study how they defined content. While I would still have some different criticisms of it, I do think ignoring articles entirely and just comparing forum posts on the National Review and forum posts on the Tea Party would have some value - it would give you a comparative sense of the interest of NR readers and Tea Party website visitors. My biggest concern there is that forum posts are self-selecting from your most hardcore people that like to talk about these issues online, as opposed to the full spectrum of conservatives and tea partiers.

Similarly, going back to this study, articles on the National Review website will reflect what National Review readers are interested in, as opposed to conservatives in general. I imagine NR readers are (in general) younger, more affluent, more educated, etc than the average person. Same sort of self-selectiveness you find if you look at US demographics vs. Newsweek or The Economist demographics, for example.

 

fair enough, but i know many conservatives who haven't even heard of it...why read when you can veg out in front of FNC.

i'm sure for the purpose of this study it's the most accurate method possible though.

 

That would be interesting to add FNC to the comparison. They obviously reach a much larger subsection of the mainstream conservative population. You'd take some of the demographic issues out of the equation, though you still have bias that their content is going to be determined in large part by the news stories of the day. Still a terrible study , but I'd be curious how their content compares to NR and Tea Party content.