Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics
Working Paper Series,
Research Institute of Industrial Economics
No 1294: 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 ()
Additional contact information
Yann Algan: Sciences Po and CEPR
Nicolò Dalvit: Sciences Po
Quoc-Anh Do: Sciences Po and CEPR
Alexis Le Chapelain: Department of Economics, Postal: Sciences Po
Yves Zenou: Monach University, Postal: Research Institute of Industrial Economics,, Stockholm, Sweden, and CEPR
Abstract: We study how friendship shapes students' political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term \integration group", unrelated to scholar activities and dissolved before the school year, as instrumental variable for their friendship, to estimate the effect of friendship on pairwise political opinion outcomes in dyadic regressions. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one quarter of the mean difference. It likely works through a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity. The effect is strong among initially similar pairs, but absent in 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
53 pages, July 4, 2019
Full text files
wp1294.pdfFull text
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Elisabeth Gustafsson ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().
This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:12:21.