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

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 14005

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Field Experiments ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: political opinion ; polarization ; friendship effect ; social networks ; homophily ; extremism ; learning ; natural experiment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Algan, Yann ; Dalvit, Nicolò ; Do, Quoc-Anh ; Le Chapelain, Alexis ; Zenou, Yves
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/232757
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET