Bitte verwenden Sie diesen Link, um diese Publikation zu zitieren, oder auf sie als Internetquelle zu verweisen: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/210935 
Erscheinungsjahr: 
2019
Schriftenreihe/Nr.: 
IFN Working Paper No. 1294
Verlag: 
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm
Zusammenfassung: 
We study how friendship shapes students' political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term "integration group", unrelated to scholar activities and dissolved before the school year, as instrumental variable for their friendship, to estimate the effect of friendship on pairwise political opinion outcomes in dyadic regressions. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one quarter of the mean difference. It likely works through a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity. The effect is strong among initially similar pairs, but absent in 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.
Schlagwörter: 
Political opinion
Polarization
Friendship effect
Social networks
Homophily
Extremism
Learning
Natural experiment
JEL: 
C93
D72
Z13
Dokumentart: 
Working Paper

Datei(en):
Datei
Größe
1.35 MB





Publikationen in EconStor sind urheberrechtlich geschützt.