Recap: I’m doing a series on the libertarian (ish) moment looking at why it feels like its happening, and thinking about if we can expect it to continue. Last post I hypothesized that the rise of the internet has made political corruption at all levels more visible and increased common knowledge of corruption which should reduce people’s trust in government and make them more libertarian ish.
For this post, I’m going to try a few goggle trend searches to test this theory. The test is not ideal because if people are seeing corruption in articles or shared links rather than searching for it, then it won’t show up in goggle search trends. Likewise, if people are searching with proper names of specific shady figures the general titles may not increase in frequency. Also data starts in 2005. That said, limitations aside, if the theory is true I’d expect to see some trend.
So, first off I searched for terms directly related to corruption to see if they increased over time. Results are decidedly mixed, one term goes way up, some go sideways, and many tilt gradually down.
Next I searched for a bunch of terms that are not directly corruption related but probably have unsavory associations or that people might look for while searching for shady behavior. No huge trend but its probably mostly down
Lastly, I searched for a bunch of terms related to local politics to see if the people are looking more into local officials with the net. Again seems to be a general downtrend
All in all, this seems to be evidence against my last post, although somewhat weak evidence given the limitations of the data. Also I just searched for trends in search terms I imagine people might use, if the people actually doing the searches actually use different terms then this would not detect that.
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