How Partisan is Atlas?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Counted my last 300 posts, going back 1 month or so. I decided to dig a little deeper and distinguish different types of left, right or neutral posts. For partisan posts, I separated those that discussed issues from those that discussed people or parties (and whether they were defending or attacking them). Note that, if I'm attacking a nominally left-wing figure from the left, I'm still counting it as an attack on the right and vice versa (so for example an attack on Rahm Emanuel goes in the left-wing category). I was inclusive in what I considered to be partisan issue discussions. For example, any broad defense of democratic principles counts as "left-wing" - conversely, my criticism of referenda counts as a "right-wing" issue position. However, defenses of specific procedural features such as parliamentarism don't count as either left or right.

My few defenses/praises of right-wingers were obviously very rare, and two of them were for John Bercow, which I realize is not ideal, but Bercow is still clearly a right-winger and my praise for him is not inherently left-wing. In terms of issue discussion, many of my right-wing policy positions come from espousing neocon-adjacent views on foreign policy. Similarly, most of my attacks "from the right" to left-wing figures were levied at Ilhan Omar and Jeremy Corbyn.

For neutral posts, I separated those that discussed politics in some form, but not in a partisan one (this includes anything from electoral analysis to discussions of historical figures to taking positions on issues that can't be classified as "left" or "right" in even the broadest definitions), to those that had just no political content at all.


Left-wing: 106 (35%)
Issue discussion: 45
Praise/defense of the left: 22
Criticism/attack on the right: 39

Right-wing: 26 (9%)
Issue discussion: 9
Praise/defense of the right: 3
Criticism/attack on the left: 14

Neutral: 168 (56%)
Political: 119
Apolitical: 49


In other words, I have 44% of "partisan" posts, and of those, 80% are left-wing.

Other interesting stats: 84% of my posts were "political" in a broad sense, and of those, 42% are left-wing, 47% are non-partisan, and 10% are right-wing. 69% of them discussed issues, while 31% discussed people or parties. Of the latter category, 78% did so from a left-wing perspective, and 22% from a right-wing one. Also, 68% of them were negative, and only 32% were positive.