While some scholars interpret the frequently documented association between age and the strength of party identification as evidence of accumulated political learning, others stress the importance of critical life stages. Germany's turbulent last century, with its suspensions of democratic...

Like many medical studies, the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) is based on a non-random "gconvenience sample" of self-recruited participants. To study processes of selectivity in BASE-II, we used a questionnaire to compare BASE-II with a large, representative reference study, the German...