Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved November 2, 2020 (received for review July 23, 2020)
Significance
Understanding the relationship between college and political ideology is of increasing importance in the United States in the context of intense partisan polarization. Leveraging a quasi-experiment and a panel survey, we find no evidence that a sample of students moves leftward along the political spectrum during the first year of college. However, we find strong evidence of a causal effect of roommates: Students move toward their randomly assigned roommates’ political ideology over the course of their first year of college. Our study identifies causal evidence of social network effects for political views and identifies these causal effects for college students specifically. Our findings are inconsistent with claims that college makes students more liberal.
Abstract
Does college change students’ political preferences? While existing research has documented associations between college education and political views, it remains unclear whether these associations reflect a causal relationship. We address this gap in previous research by analyzing a quasi-experiment in which university students are assigned to live together as roommates. While we find little evidence that college students as a whole become more liberal over time, we do find strong evidence of peer effects, in which students’ political views become more in line with the views of their roommates over time. This effect is strongest for conservative students. These findings shed light on the role of higher education in an era of political polarization.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: lstrothe{at}purdue.edu.
Author contributions: E.G., S.E.G., and D.E. designed research; E.G. and D.E. performed research; L.S., S.P., E.G., and D.E. analyzed data; and L.S., S.P., and S.E.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2015514117/-/DCSupplemental.
Data Availability.
A restricted data set is available on request at: https://healthymindsnetwork.org/research/data-for-researchers/ (38).
- Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
College roommates have a modest but significant influence on each other’s political ideology
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