New Political Patterns

We are still divided, but the boundaries are changing...

I have been doing a social network analysis of the purchase patterns of political books since 2003. A quick analysis of Amazon's sales data of political books gives us a highly similar analysis to that of political pollsters & pundits. In the past we saw a divided nation in our book buying data. In 2004 we saw a distinct red cluster and a distinct blue cluster with very little holding them together in terms of cross-links or books in common. The 2004 network analysis was published in the New York Times.

Now, in June 2008, after the major party candidates have been selected via the long primary season, we again probe the predictive patterns of partisan 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.

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?