TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Algan, Yann
AU  - Dalvit, Nicolò
AU  - Do, Quoc-Anh
AU  - Chapelain, Alexis Le
AU  - Zenou, Yves
        TI  - Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians
        PY  - 2020/Dec/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 14005
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp14005
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - political opinion
KW  - polarization
KW  - friendship effect
KW  - social networks
KW  - homophily
KW  - extremism
KW  - learning
KW  - natural experiment
        ER  -