A recent paper by Farrell, Lawrence, and Sides found that more blog readers self-identified as liberal, rather than conservative.  In a bloggingheads diavlog and post at CT, Farrell also argues that democrats have dominated the Internet early, since blogging took off when the Republicans held the presidency and Congress. The internet may also appeal to younger people who tend to be more liberal than older people.

This poses real problems for the Republican party. Will they be able to catch up? Republicans took early domination of talk radio and the left was never able catch up in that medium. They now face the same difficult catch-up position in the Internet, that Democrats faced in talk radio in the 1980s.

I’m not entirely sure that liberals control the Internet. In a paper that I did with my colleague, Toni Pole, we found that more bloggers in our study identified as conservative or libertarian. A quick look at the top 100 bloggers shows a healthy balance between the left and the right (though I have to admit being too lazy to count them up.) Outside of the blogosphere, Democrats have been much better about using all
tools of new media – YouTube and social networking software, but within
the blogosphere, many of the early adopters were conservative who were
all steamed up about 9/11 (ie Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt, Lileks, Sullivan). Perhaps the huge success of Huffington Post, a late adopter, is helping to skew readership to the left.

I do think that liberal bloggers have an entirely different mission than conservative bloggers. Liberal bloggers, taking the lead from guys like Kos, are more interested in political mobilization, while conservative bloggers have been more interested in attacking the media and academia, which they perceive as preservers of the liberal order. (Our paper hints at that finding, but we needed a larger N to prove that point.) The mission of liberal bloggers may be more successful and more attractive to future blog readers.