• 03 Apr 2023
• 2023

CELG Seminar: "Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians"

The College of Economics, Law and Government would like to respectfully invite lecturers/researchers to come and share your experiences at the CELG seminar:

• Topic: Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians
• Presenter: Assoc.Prof. Quoc-Anh Do, Monash University
• Time: 10:30 AM (Vietnam), Monday, April 03, 2023
• Location: Room B1-1001, 279 Nguyen Tri Phuong St, Ward 5, Dist 10, HCMC

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 curriculum, 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

About presenter:

Quoc-Anh Do is Associate Professor of Economics at Monash University. He has recently been Visiting Associate Professor at the Ford Center for Global Citizenship, Kellogg Public-Private Interface Initiative, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He was previously Associate Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies) in Paris, France. He obtained his PhD in 2008 from Harvard University’s Department of Economics. His research interests span over several applied microeconomic topics, especially in political economics, economics of social networks, development economics, economic history, and corporate governance. He has published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Journal of the European Economic Association.

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