Not so different in present attitudes and behaviour, but expected future membership: A technical replication of a study of party youth in six European democracies

Abstract

Based on the statistical analysis of an original survey of young party members from six European democracies, a study concluded that three types of young members differed systematically regarding their membership objectives, activism, efficacy and perceptions of the party and self-perceived political future. We performed a technical replication of the original study, correcting four deficiencies, which led us to a different conclusion. First, we discuss substantive significance in addition to statistical significance. Second, we ran significance tests on all comparisons instead of limiting them to an arbitrary subset. Third, we performed pairwise comparisons between the three types of members instead of using pooled groups. Fourth, we avoided the inflation of the type-I error rate due to multiple testing by using the Bonferroni–Holm correction. We found that most of the differences between the types lacked substantive significance, and that statistical significance only coherently distinguished the types of members in their future membership, but not in their present behaviour and attitudes.