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
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Nicolò Dalvit: Sciences Po, Paris

No 14005, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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. We exploit arbitrary assignments of students into short-term integration groups before their scholar cursus, and use the pairwise indicator of same-group membership as instrumental variable for friendship. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one third 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; polarization; friendship effect; social networks; homophily; extremism; learning; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D72 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his, nep-net, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians (2023)
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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