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Category: Project

Description: Based on the statistical analysis of an original survey of young party members from six European democracies, Bruter and Harrison (2009) conclude that three types of young members differ systematically regarding their membership objectives, activism, efficacy and perceptions of the party and self-perceived political future. We perform a technical replication of the original study correcting four deficiencies that lead us to a different conclusion. First, we discuss substantive significance in addition to statistical significance. Second, we run significance tests on all comparisons instead of limiting them to an arbitrary subset. Third, we perform pairwise comparisons between the three types of members instead of using pooled groups. Fourth, we avoid the inflation of the type-I error rate due to multiple testing by using the Bonferroni-Holm correction. We find that most of the differences between the types lack substantive significance and that statistical significance only coherently distinguishes the types of members in their future membership, but not in their present behavior and attitudes.