Are Politicians Responsive to Mass Shootings? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

TL;DR

This study investigates whether mass shootings influence U.S. state legislators' voting behavior on firearm policies, finding no significant change even after shootings occur within their districts, indicating limited responsiveness to such tragedies.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of legislators' voting responses to mass shootings using a large dataset and a robust difference-in-differences approach.

Findings

Mass shootings within districts do not significantly alter legislators' firearm policy positions.

Legislators' voting behavior remains stable regardless of proximity to shootings.

The null effect persists across partisan and shooting characteristic analyses.

Abstract

The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask whether legislators change their voting behavior on firearm policy in the wake of mass shootings. We estimate the latent gun-policy positions of 14,585 state legislators across all 50 states using roll-call votes on firearm-related bills from 2011 to 2022. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we find that mass shootings occurring within a legislator's district do not, on average, measurably shift their positionality on firearm policy. This null effect is robust across analyses accounting for legislators' partisanship, their geographic proximity to the shooting, and characteristics of individual shootings. Our findings suggest that even acute, locally salient tragedies fail to cause changes in how legislators vote on firearm policy.