Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians

Yann Algan, Nicolò Dalvit, Quoc-Anh Do, Alexis Le Chapelain and Yves Zenou

No 10753, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. Quasi-random assignments of students into the same short-term integration groups before their scholar curriculum reduce political opinion gap, and increase friendship formation. Using the pairwise indicator of same-group membership as instrumental variable for friendship, we find that friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by 40% of the standard deviation of opinion gap. The evidence is consistent with a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes initially politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity, without exercising an effect on initially politically-dissimilar pairs. Friendship affects opinion gaps by reducing divergence, therefore polarization and extremism, without forcing individuals’ views to converge. Network characteristics also matter to the friendship effect.

Keywords: political opinion; social networks; friendship effect; polarization; homophily; extremism; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D72 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-net, nep-pol, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Related works:
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2020)
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2019)
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2019)
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2019)
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2019)
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