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An Automated Snowball Census Of The Political Web, Abe Gong

JITP 2011: The Future of Computational Social Science

This paper solves a persistent methodological problem for social scientists studying the political web: representative sampling. Virtu- ally all existing studies of the political web are based on incomplete samples, and therefore lack generalizability. In this paper, I combine methods from computer science and sampling theory to conduct an automated snowball census of the political web and constructs an all- but-complete index of English political websites. I check the robust- ness of this index, use it to generate descriptive statistics for the entire political web, and demonstrate that studies based on ad hoc sampling strategies are likely to be biased …