IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33093.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Comrades and Cause: Peer Influence on West Point Cadets' Civil War Allegiances

Author

Listed:
  • Yuchen Guo
  • Matthew O. Jackson
  • Ruixue Jia

Abstract

Do social networks and peer influence shape major life decisions in highly polarized settings? We explore this question by examining how peers influenced the allegiances of West Point cadets during the American Civil War. Leveraging quasi-random variations in the proportion of cadets from Free States, we analyze how these differences affected decisions about which army to join. We find that a higher proportion of classmates from Free States significantly increased the likelihood that cadets from Slave States joined the Union Army, while almost all cadets from Free States joined the Union Army (if they decided to join the war). We further examine how cadets’ decisions affected their military rank and career outcomes. Our findings highlight that peers still influence choices even when they are life-altering and occur during periods of extreme polarization.

Suggested Citation

  • Yuchen Guo & Matthew O. Jackson & Ruixue Jia, 2024. "Comrades and Cause: Peer Influence on West Point Cadets' Civil War Allegiances," NBER Working Papers 33093, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33093
    Note: DAE PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33093.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D85 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Network Formation
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • N31 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • N41 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33093. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.