Mobilize for Our Lives? School Shootings and Democratic Accountability in U.S. Elections

Abstract

Gun violence is a large and growing problem in the United States. Many reformers look towards elections to spur policy change in this area. In this paper, we explore the effects of school shootings on electoral mobilization and election outcomes. We pair data from several sources that measure validated voter registration; validated voter turnout; and the electoral performance of officials at the local, state, and federal levels with regression discontinuity and panel methods. Our effects show that shootings have little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States. Our work demonstrates that even when tragic events occur that are squarely in the realm of elected officials’ responsibility, have high levels of issue salience, are highly-covered by the media, draw citizens’ attention, and (perhaps) shift public opinion, these seemingly favorable conditions may not be enough to elicit democratic accountability.

Violence and Voting in the United States: How School Shootings Affect Elections

“…Moreover, other research shows that increased partisan polarization causes political attitudes to be less responsive to new information (Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus 2013). Consistent with this literature, a recent study of the effects of all types of school shootingsincluding rampage school shootings as well as those related to gang conflicts and interpersonal fights-finds that these events do not affect participation in elections or the relative electoral support received by each party (Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin 2020). Nonetheless, other studies find that, under the right conditions, some individuals' views on gun control can shift as a result of gun violence (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2001;Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2018;Pearson-Merkowitz and Dyck 2017).…”

“…Although Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin (2020) do not provide a definition of school shooting, they implicitly rely on broader inclusion criteria that seem to include all shootings that take place on school grounds. Thus, although each study began with the same list of shootings, Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin (2020) include in their dataset a number of incidents that-because they do not fit our definition of rampage shootings-we chose to exclude. This is an important distinction: Because nonrampage shootings-such as targeted instances of gang violence or suicides-are nonrandom, they are both less likely to trigger some of the feelings, discussed earlier in the paper, that could cause individuals to alter their political behavior and are less appropriate for causal inference.…”

“…Average Effect of a School Shooting on DMA-Level Democratic Vote Share proportion of total school shootings, but this is not the case. Indeed, during the overlapping years in our studies (2006 to 2015), Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin (2020) include 147 school shootings. This contrasts with the 56 shootings we have for that same period after excluding shootings that do not meet the criteria for rampage shootings.…”

“…However, prior studies on the localized effects of mass shootings have produced inconclusive results: one study finds that individuals who live near such events become more supportive of gun control (Newman and Hartman 2017), but another finds that these effects disappear when an improved geocoding scheme is used (Barney and Schaffner 2019). The only study to date that has investigated whether school shootings influence electoral outcomes finds that they do not (Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin 2020). The dataset used in this study, however, includes many nonrampage school shootings (e.g., suicides, gang violence on school grounds, and fights that escalated); these eventswhich actually outnumber rampage school shootings -are nonrandom, which makes them less useful statistically and also less likely, theoretically, to produce the sorts of feelings that may cause individuals to change their political behavior.…”

“…See appendix A.5 for a few examples of shootings that we exclude and that appear inHassell, Holbein and Baldwin (2020).…”