%0 Report
        %A Algan, Yann
%A Dalvit, Nicolò
%A Do, Quoc-Anh
%A Chapelain, Alexis Le
%A Zenou, Yves
        %T Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians
        %D 2020
        %8 2020 Dec
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 14005
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp14005
        %X 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.
        %K political opinion
%K polarization
%K friendship effect
%K social networks
%K homophily
%K extremism
%K learning
%K natural experiment