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The potential of online sampling for studying political activists around the world and across time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2017

Kai Jäger
Kai Jäger*
Affiliation:
Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and Department of Political Science, University of Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim, Germany. Email: kai.jaeger@mzes.uni-mannheim.de
*
*Email: kai.jaeger@mzes.uni-mannheim.de
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Abstract

Parties and social movements play an important role in many theories of political science. Yet, the study of intraparty politics remains underdeveloped as random samples are difficult to conduct among political activists. This paper proposes a novel procedure to sample different parties over time and space by utilizing the advertising option of the social media webpage Facebook. As this method allows for quotas and the collection of large samples at relatively low cost, it becomes possible to improve the representativeness through poststratification and subsample robustness checks. Three examples illustrate these advantages of Facebook sampling: First, a Facebook sample approximated intraparty decisions and the outcome of a leadership contest of the Alternative for Germany. Second, a weighted Facebook sample achieved similar estimates as a representative local leader survey of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Third, by evaluating subgroups of key demographics for parties with unknown population parameters, two Facebook samples show that the color-coded conflict in Thailand was driven by different concepts of regime type, but not by a left–right divide on economic policy-making. Facebook sampling appears to be the best and cheapest method to conduct time-series cross-sectional studies for political activists.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 329 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. 

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Footnotes

Author’s note: I would like to thank Ron Lehrer, Nikolay Marinov, Adam Scharpf, and Daniel Weitzel for helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Marlis Benze, Jens Meiners, and Pittaya Petchmark for survey collaboration. The ethics commission of the University of Mannheim decided that it has no general objection against the Facebook-based sampling procedure of the study. The replication materials are available on the Harvard Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/346Y30. Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis website.

Contributing Editor: R. Michael Alvarez

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