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Friendship Networks and Political Opinions

Yann Algan¹; Nicolò Dalvit²; Quoc-Anh Do³; Alexis Le Chapelain⁴; Yves Zenou⁵

¹ HEC and CEPR (email: ) · ² World Bank (email: ) · ³ Monash University, CEPR, and CESifo (email: ) · ⁴ (email: ) · ⁵ Monash University, University of Southampton, and CEPR (email: )

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.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20231344

Volume

116 (6)

Pages

2202-2241

Language

en

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BibTeX

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