Does the Web Democratize Politics?

New research by Matthew Hindman, a doctoral fellow at Harvard’s National Center for Digital Government at the Kennedy School, indicates that political discourse on the web is not as open and democratic as political theorists once believed. Hindman spoke last week on the topic, “Why the Link Structure of the Web Matters for Politics," to explain how political sites interlink.  Hindman's data shows that the vast majority of websites link to only a handful of sites or, more technically, web traffic follows a power law distribution. According to Hindman, this conclusion challenges the traditional, 1990s idea of the Internet a level playing field for political discourse because, in reality, a select few “market leaders” dominate the overwhelming majority of user traffic.