fact finder
Many media outlets had reported that 22 percent of young people in Germany would vote for the AfD. However, those who were still undecided were not taken into account. The proportion of AfD supporters is therefore lower overall.
“Move to the right among the young generation”, “Many young people for AfD” or “22 percent of young people would vote for AfD”: these are the headlines for the study “Youth in Germany”, which made waves at the end of April. The focus was particularly on the party preferences of young people. That’s what it says in one, among other things Article of the “World”, “that 22 percent of 14 to 29 year olds would vote for AfD – a doubling within a year.” But this statement is at least misleading.
In the study, which has been carried out regularly since 2020 by youth researcher Simon Schnetzer and his colleagues, the 22 percent appears – but only refers to those respondents who, on the one hand, know who they would vote for and, on the other hand, who they would would go vote. And that makes a significant difference.
A good third of those surveyed have no preference
As the study shows, 25 percent of those surveyed – one in four – answered “I don’t know” when asked who they would vote for. Another ten percent said they would not vote. This means that more than a third of those surveyed stated no party preference at all. Of the 2,042 respondents, around 715 did not name a party.
The 22 percent for the AfD as well as the information on the other parties therefore only refer to those respondents who even named a party. Looking at all respondents, the proportion of those who would vote for the AfD is only around 14.3 percent.
Of course, the same applies to the information about the other parties: These also only apply to the total number of respondents who would actually vote and who also know which party. For the CDU/CSU it would be just under 13 percent of all respondents instead of 20 percent, for the Greens it would be just under 12 percent instead of 18 percent.
It is not unusual that the study itself did not take into account the proportion of undecided or non-voters when asked about their voting decision – including the so-called Sunday questions, for example ARD GermanyTrend this is how it is handled. However, the formulation by some media that 22 percent of 14 to 29 year olds would vote for the AfD is at least misleading, as it gives the impression that these are all young people.
criticism of Collection method
There are also other points that experts believe limit the significance of the survey. The head of the opinion research institute Forsa, Manfred Güllner, said: opposite the “image” criticized the recruitment method. The results of the study are based on a so-called online access panel. This is a database of potential participants in online surveys.
However, in such surveys, statistical experts consider a fundamental bias in the data to be very likely. One of the reasons for this is that such panels often contain people who are in need of information or curious and who also have a certain affinity for technology. Katharina Schüller, board member of the German Statistical Society, among others, criticized this last year in a survey by the non-governmental organization Plan International.
Güllner also pointed this out. “AfD supporters are more active online than sympathizers of other parties. That is why they are generally over-represented in so-called online panels where you can register yourself as a participant,” he told “Bild”. “As a result of this distortion, the young people surveyed with the help of such a panel are also more likely than average to be supporters of the AfD.”
“Results not representative”
When asked, study author Schnetzer said that a critical look at the composition of online panels is fundamentally necessary “since participation, like all other survey methods, is based on voluntary participation.” From experience, it is more difficult to reach people with lower levels of education and low online affinity. “In my opinion, the thesis that online access panels are being infiltrated by the AfD should be treated with great caution and proof – both for and against – would be very difficult to provide.”
According to Schnetzer, participants are recruited through the same panel every year. “In addition to the fixed quotas for age and gender, we ask the panel provider to control the survey in such a way that we can also reflect the soft quotas for the educational level of the participants, their parents and the migration background/nationality in accordance with the demographic distribution in Germany.”
From the point of view of statistics expert Schüller, however, this is not enough. Given the conditions, statistical conclusions about the population are only possible under strong model assumptions. “Weighting based on a few socio-demographic characteristics such as age and gender cannot compensate for this problem,” says Schüller. This is all the more true since apparently not largely the same participants were surveyed every year.
“If you don’t know how the composition of the panel has changed, you can’t say anything about whether the degree of selection bias might have changed in some way,” says Schüller. “In summary, in my opinion, we neither know how big the distortion is nor whether it has changed over the years. I think that talking about representativeness here is at least grossly negligent.”
AfD weaker in other surveys
Last week, the opinion research institute Forsa published its own survey on the voting behavior of young people. Accordingly, the AfD only has 14 percent of those surveyed who would vote and have chosen a party – the CDU/CSU and the Greens each had 21 percent.
In contrast to the youth study, 18 to 29 year olds were surveyed, i.e. four fewer age groups. However, as “Zeit” writes, the difference in the results cannot be determined by this. Calculated over the same age range, the AfD is still at 22 percent in the youth study.
The period of the surveys is also slightly different: for the youth study, young people were surveyed from January 8th to February 12th, while the Forsa survey ran from January to April. In the ARD GermanyTrend The AfD was 22 percent in all age groups on January 4th, 19 percent on February 1st and 18 percent on April 4th, meaning it lost four percentage points within three months. The difference between the two surveys by Forsa and the youth study is again significantly higher at eight percentage points, and there is at least some overlap in the survey periods.
The authors of the youth study write that an error rate of up to ten percent can be expected. In the case of the AfD, that would mean a range of 19.8 to 24.2 percent. Last year the proportion in the youth study was twelve percent. For comparison: In ARD GermanyTrend In January 2023, the AfD was 15 percent of the total population, i.e. it had increased by seven percentage points by January of this year, compared to February by four percentage points.
Election results vary greatly depending on the region
A look at the actual voting decisions of young people shows that there have been very strong differences depending on the election and region in recent years. According to the ARD GermanyTrends For example, in the 2019 European elections only five percent of eligible voters under the age of 25 voted for the AfD; in the 2021 federal election it was seven percent.
In the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021, however, the AfD achieved 17 percent in the age group and 16 percent in Bavaria in 2023. In the elections in Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia (both in 2022), the AfD did not even reach five percent in the age group.