Fiche du document
1 juin 2019
- handle: 10670/1.cxi3ud
- hal: hal-03393089
- SCIENCESPO: 2441/6g4f57e9if8d98agaso2prcnu9
Ce document est lié à :
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/hdl/2441/6g4f57e9if8d98agaso2prcnu9
Ce document est lié à :
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement//647870/EU/Social Preferences, Well-Being and Policy/SOWELL
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Mots-clés
Extremism Friendship Effect Homophily Learning Natural experiment Polarization Politcal opinion Social networks Extremism C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods/C.C9 - Design of Experiments/C.C9.C93 - Field Experiments D - Microeconomics/D.D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making/D.D7.D72 - Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior Z - Other Special Topics/Z.Z1 - Cultural Economics • Economic Sociology • Economic Anthropology/Z.Z1.Z13 - Economic Sociology • Economic Anthropology • Social and Economic StratificationSujets proches
Affection FriendlinessCiter ce document
Yann Algan et al., « Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians », Archive ouverte de Sciences Po (SPIRE), ID : 10670/1.cxi3ud
Métriques
Partage / Export
Résumé
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.