Do School Shootings Mobilize the Public?

• In Event: Education and Public Opinion

Abstract

Scholars have previously documented that social movements around gun violence have had disappointingly small effects on gun legislation. In spite of gun violence being an ever-salient problem and previous research showing that mass shootings shift the public’s policy attitudes towards a more pro-gun control stance, at present legislators have (mostly) not responded to mass shootings with meaningful legislative change. Why hasn’t public policy reacted to the apparent national indignation in response to these mass shootings? In this paper, we test the possibility that reactionary movements fail to mobilize the public’s desire for political change into action in the vitally important domain of registering and voting. To do so, we combine several regression discontinuity in time methods (which leverage exogenous variation in the precise timing of school shootings) with a unique individual-level nationwide voter file to explore the effect of school shootings over the last decade on citizens’ rates of voter registration. Our early results suggest that school shootings appear to have little to no effect on rates of citizen voter registration. This precisely-estimated null effect is systematic across the electorate: being in place regardless of one’s political party, age, race, and proximity to the school shooting. Our results imply that social movements for gun control may fall short because they fail to connect attitudinal change with behavioral change.

Authors

• John Holbein, University of Virginia

• Hans J.G. Hassell, Florida State University