Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians
CESifo, Munich, 2023
CESifo Working Paper No. 10753
We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. Quasi-random assignments of students into the same short-term integration groups before their scholar curriculum reduce political opinion gap, and increase friendship formation. Using the pairwise indicator of same-group membership as instrumental variable for friendship, we find that friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by 40% 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.
Public Choice
Economics of Education