Does Politics Stack Exchange as a whole have a bias? If so, how can it possibly be quantified?

Question

Background

This site is supposed to be about the following:

Specific issues with governments, policies and political processes

Real problems or questions that you’ve encountered

And not about the following:

Anything not directly related to governments, policies and political processes

Questions that are primarily opinion-based

Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer

However, it is impossible to entirely remove bias from how questions are asked. Likewise in answering, voting, commenting, and moderating. Every action has the possibility of some bias behind it. Add the word "Politics" into the mix, and it is inevitable that even within the accepted scope of "specific issues with policies" with lead to a discussion of opinions. We must all aim to be responsible in how we do our actions, but there is no guarantee that is the case. Not everyone reads meta, and there is no presence like academic or scientific rigor elsewhere that exists here. Only the collective actions of the community and the Stack Exchange company.

Question

Because of this reality, it is worth asking the following question "Does Politics Stack Exchange, as a whole, have a bias"?

Corollary

Furthermore, in answering that question, some sort of quantification or measurement must be taken (for the answer to the above question to elicit fact). But whoever partakes of this measurement or task is almost certainly part of this community, and thus the collective bias. Thus I ask the following corollary as well: "How is it possible to objectively quantify this bias, if we, in this community, compose part of it?"

Answer 1

SE can be extremely Marxist in some cases. Like getting great many upvotes for claiming labor markets only exist in the fetid minds of the right wing. That's an answer from the same user above says who there is no bias in SE.

I'm sure one can find more examples of one kind of weirdness or another. But like I said in some comments, it's going to be extremely hard to quantify the bias across all questions and answers unless one is willing to conducts some studies that aren't cheap to conduct.

Things about SE that were easy enough to study like early answers getting more votes than later ones were studied in academic papers as well.

If you're curious how such content-bias studies are conducted when there is enough motivation; you can look at how some such studies were conducted regarding Wikipedia's contents. Mind you, any such study involves either some kind of automated process that ranks contents by some keywords or uses human judges to score a small sample of articles/pages. Neither method is exactly foolproof. An example:

In Is Wikipedia Biased? (2012), the authors examined a sample of 28,382 articles related to U.S. politics as of January 2011, measuring their degree of bias on a "slant index" based on a method developed by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro in 2010, to measure bias in newspaper media. This slant index purports to measure an ideological lean toward either Democratic or Republican based on key phrases within the text such as "war in Iraq", "civil rights", "trade deficit", "economic growth", "illegal immigration" and "border security". Each phrase is assigned a slant index based on how often it is used by Democratic vs. Republican members of U.S. Congress and this lean rating is assigned to a Wikipedia contribution that includes the same key phrase. The authors concluded that older articles from the early years of Wikipedia leaned Democratic, whereas those created more recently held more balance. They suggest that articles did not change their bias significantly due to revision, but rather that over time newer articles containing opposite points of view were responsible for centering the average overall.

Answer 2

There's an old saw I heard once that's worth considering:

Philosophy is the art of making a story that fits the facts; rhetoric is the art of making the facts fit a story.

I think this is doubly true when we turn to politics and society, but unfortunately it often takes some discernment to see the difference. The point, though, is that one is always telling a story, and telling a story invariably invokes a point of view. We cannot escape a trace of bias.

Musings aside, there's a difference in argumentation style between conservatives and liberals that might give the impression of systemic bias. Conservatism runs heavy on what Habermas called the normative reasoning style: arguments founded in ideas that are pre-given as true and immutable. Conservatism usually aligns itself with the status quo and sees itself as arguing from a moral high-ground, and so answers and comments from the conservative side of the spectrum tend to be on the short, straight, simple side. Few people belabor the status quo, because the status quo is (from their perspective) both self-evident and intrinsically good. Liberals, by contrast, usually feel like underdogs, because they tend to argue against the status quo in favor of some (to their eyes) positive change. This desire to 'argue for' leads them towards (Habermas') communicative reasoning style, which aims to convince and reach consensus. It's more deliberate, more complex, more geared towards nuance and fine distinctions, and all-in-all a much wordier style of expression. I imagine that all other things being equal, liberals are likely to use ten words for every word a conservative writes, if only because liberals feel the need to argue and defend things where conservatives will merely assert things as true.

And of course, this doesn't consider those out there just aiming to be 'influencers' (Habermas' dramaturgical style), or the trolls whose only goal is to score points (teleological reasoning style) regardless of which side of the spectrum they come from...

Written communication — even social media communication like this — disadvantages the normative reasoning style, because norms have most power when they are collective group expressions (pragmatically difficult to achieve on a site like this). Some conservative posters manage it, and other conservatives enter into the communicative style, so it works out. Any appearance of overall bias is just that, I think: an appearance, not a truth. The left may have more words by volume, but that doesn't necessarily translate to better answers or more cogent points.