Friendship Networks and Political Opinions

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

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We examine how social interactions and friendships shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, a leading French university specializing in social and political sciences. The quasi-random assignment of students into short-term integration groups before their academic curriculum reduces political opinion gaps and fosters friendship formation. Using same-group membership as an instrumental variable for friendship, we find that friendship reduces opinion differences by 40% of a standard deviation in the opinion gap. Our evidence supports a homophily-enforced mechanism: friendships form among initially politically similar students, leading them to join political associations together, reinforcing their similarity. However, friendship does not significantly influence politically dissimilar pairs. Instead, it reduces opinion divergence without enforcing ideological convergence.

Keywords: Political opinion; social networks; friendship effect; polarization; homophily; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05187165

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5184305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().