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: ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Yves Zenou: IFN - Research Institute of Industrial Economics

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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: Extremism; Friendship Effect; Homophily; Learning; Natural experiment; Polarization; Politcal opinion; Social networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03393089
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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 (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)
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