I have received questions before on why I do not cover more of the ongoing election. The reason is simple, and I’m going to share it with you later in this post. But as this blog is mainly not about my opinion, I though to do a quick experiment. The following research is not meant in aany way to be scientifically totally correct nor fully representative of the Hungarian blogoshpere. It’s a simple analysis I made to satisfy my own interest in the hope of bringing something interesting to you too.

Most of the votes were already processed on Sunday evening. So on Monday evening I though to check the latest updated 50 blogs of one of the largest blog hoster in Hungary (around 8-9pm) to see whether on average people do or do not comment about the results. I was surprised to see that out of those 50 blogs only 6 actually mentions the election at all! 2 neutrally commenting, 1 hating politics in all aspects and 3 seemed happy with the results.

Now I thought, maybe I should check the entries that were created on the night of the election results (Sunday). How rapidly Bloggers are commenting? So I checked 50 blogs that were last updated on Sunday evening around 9-10pm (by this time more-or less a fairly well processed results was available). This time in my sample of 50 only 3(!) blogs had entries on the election, 1 being happy and 2 generally hating all politics. So maybe the people who were interested either do not blog or were still watching the results and political analysis coverage and interviews.

My last hope was to check blogs that were updated on Monday morning. By that time people knew the end results of this first election round and I selected an early hour in between the two previous time spots (8-9pm). This time the picture was dramatically different. The majority (appr. 70%) of the 50 blogs that has been updated at this period still had zero reflection about that even an election actually took place. But the remaining 30% (7 times the number of Sunday evening and 3 times the number on Monday evening) had all opinions fairly well covered. Seen happy voice, said voices, political hating voices and neutral commenter voices too.

Again I’m not planning to draw any conclusions based on the above, still I found the results interesting.

Personal comment:
I promised to give you the reason why I did not write too much about election and the campaign. I have a pretty straight forward opinion about the current Hungarian political landscape. And instead of trying to put into my own word in English I use a quote from a South Park episode where there is an election for a new mascot for the school team: “the most fundamental rule of elections that you will always have to choose between a douche and a turd”… And before you ask: yes, I did went to vote, I do think it is important, I just had to accept the fact that all I can choose from are douches and turds.

Tags:
Election