“With a little help from my friends”? The role of social interaction in immigrants' perception of their ability to understand politics in the Netherlands

Abstract The Netherlands has a long-standing history of receiving immigrants from both Western and non-Western ethnic backgrounds. The manuscript investigates the extent to which increasing levels of social interaction measured by the number of native-born friends play a role in immigrants' internal political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is a psychological concept defined as one's self-perception of one's ability to understand politics. Employing panel data, we mainly show that friendship with native-born individuals has different sizeable effects for Western immigrants than non-Western immigrants. As the number of close native-born friends increases, so does the sense of internal political efficacy, but only for Western immigrants. In the case of non-Western immigrants, the results point to the opposite: An increase in the number of close Dutch friends reduces non-Western immigrants' sense of internal political efficacy. Findings also partially showed that the positive effect of Dutch friends on internal political efficacy is the most pronounced in the case of second-generation immigrants with a Western origin. The result reveals the different levels of integration of these large groups of immigrants in Dutch society.