But self-identification here is misleading, as we can see if we look at a scale measuring blogreaders’ attitudes to a number of hot-button political issues such as abortion and the Iraq war, where left and right disagreed strongly at the time the data was gathered (nb that this scale has more points at which readers’ ideologies may be located than the first one).

But there are less of them then there are of readers who identify themselves as only somewhat liberal, or as centrists. There are a fair number of left-leaning blog readers who identify themselves as strongly liberal. Start by looking at a graph showing how readers of leftwing blogs, rightwing blogs, and people who read both identify themselves when they are asked where they fit on the liberal-conservative spectrum. These graphs, taken from Eric Lawrence, John Sides’ and my “paper”: on blog readers and polarization, illustrate this pretty well. But in fact, they’re very strongly and coherently to the left. Netroots blog readers may _identify themselves_ as being a mixed bag of ideologies. And the reason that it doesn’t sit well is that I and the others were wrong. The fact of this alliance plausibly doesn’t fit well with “arguments”: that I and others have made to the effect that netroots types are not especially left-leaning.

The “New York Times”: has an article today talking about a new alliance between netroots-type left bloggers, MoveOn and SEIU to start challenging conservative Democrats in primaries. Similarly, even if people in more religious or Republican states _were_ more inclined to purchase porn online, this doesn’t imply that religious _people_ or _individual_ Republicans were more inclined to purchase porn online, and I can think of at least two or three plausible alternative causal mechanisms that would explain the observed correlation. showed, that inference was directly misleading. This is directly analogous to “Heritage horseflop”: claiming that because rich states tend to support Democrats, therefore the Democrats are the party of the rich. There are _all sorts_ of obvious ecological problems in drawing inferences about religious people’s individual propensities from aggregate data. The data is all aggregated at the state or zipcode level, but the decision to purchase or not purchase porn online is obviously an individual one. But even if there _were_ strong results, they wouldn’t necessarily tell us much. I’m not sure whether to blame the New Scientist or the paper’s author, who perhaps seems (if quoted fairly and accurately, which is of course by no means certain – he could have made a few vague handwaves that were taken completely out of context) to have hammed up his results a bit in the interview. Nor does there seem to be _any_ discussion in the piece of correlations between porn consumption and voting patterns in the most recent presidential election. What evidence there is in the paper of a relationship between religious faith and porn consumption seems, as best as I can interpret the relevant table, to be based on a simple OLS regression with no reported control variables. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in blue states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the red states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.

However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. … Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p 0.848).īq. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.īut if you look at the “actual study”: (PDF), not so much.īq. … Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election â€“ Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Andrew Sullivan “links to”: a “New Scientist”: story suggesting that they do.

Nytimes 6 party quiz