Methodology
Outline
Our project used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to
understand the motivations, perceptions, and behaviour of young party
members.
The project focused on the young members of 15 political parties in six European democracies: France, UK, Germany, Spain, Norway, and Hungary. The quantitative part of the data collection consisted of a mass survey of nearly 3000 of them, and the qualitative section on the in-depth interviews of over 500 of them. The first results of the study are available here. We now expect several academic publications such as books and articles in major journals to be published soon.
The Survey
We asked parties to circulate an invitation to complete one page survey about the motivations and
background of members aged 18 to 25 to the members of a representative
sample of branches, usually via e-mail.
The party members were given a party code to fill in our questionnaire
directly on line on www.youngpm.org.
The questionnaire took about 5 to 10 minutes to answer and was available in
the languages of the six countries included in the study. The survey is
still accessible on this website, so feel free to have a look. We obtained
very high response rates with all the parties involved, and in total, over
3000 young party members answered the survey, leaving us with 2919 valid
completed questionnaires (some included an unidentifiable code or contained
crucial missing answers).
The Interviews
Following the distribution of the survey, we invited volunteers to
participate in in-depth one-to-one interviews. Almost all of the interviews
were conducted in the native language of the participants using a network of
researchers hired for the occasion, the only exception being a small
sub-sample of interviews conducted together by Michael Bruter, Sarah
Harrison, and the local researcher for training purposes. In total over 500
people participated in our interviews in all six countries. For practical
reasons and to have sufficient numbers of respondents from each party, we
only targeted 10 parties for the interviews. The in-depth interviews were
semi-structured, which means that interviewers, who were all specifically
trained for the project interviews, were given a list of topics to approach
rather than a specific list of questions, and were encouraged to vary the
orientation of the interviews depending on the input of the participants.
Some of the themes (common to all interviews) included the way in which the
young member decided to get involved in politics, his/her activities as a
party member, his/her perceptions of internal party organisation and
democracy, the way his/her friends and parents react to his/her political
involvement, his/her expected professional and partisan future, etc. The
interviews varied in length, from about 45 minutes for the shortest ones to
up to 3 hours in some cases!