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Introduction
Between 1980 and 2016, 117 rampage school shootings took place in 40 US states. 1 More than 234 people died, most of whom were children. None of these events went unnoticed: each time, the country mourned the dead and debated intensely about gun control. Citizens voiced their outrage, politicians—depending on their views—responded with attempts to pass or prevent new regulations, and gun control became more salient and divisive (Elsass, Schildkraut, and Stafford 2016; Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2013). Did these profound experiences alter political behavior? Specifically, did people living in areas where school shootings took place change their voting behavior? We offer a novel empirical study of the effect of school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican parties in counties where such shootings have occurred.
Extant scholarship in American and comparative politics on related topics does not provide clear theoretical expectations. Indeed, literatures on the behavioral effects of violence and the drivers of political behavior produce somewhat different expectations about whether, and how, violence may affect voters’ choices. The growing research on the effects of terrorism, civil war, and crime suggests that violence can either increase or decrease political participation. This body of work has also found that violence can influence partisan preferences in various ways, such as in favor of the incumbent or in support for more radical parties (Bateson 2012; Bauer et al. 2016; Córdova 2019; Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014; Hersh 2013; Hobfoll, Canetti-Nisim, and Johnson 2006; Ley 2018; Malone 2010; Montalvo 2011; Parás, Coleman, and Seligson 2006; Pérez 2003; Robbins, Hunter, and Murray 2013; Trelles and Carreras 2012). However, little is known about the conditions under which violence can trigger each of these effects.
Scholarship on preference change, for its part, has mostly focused on the influence of new information that is received via mass or interpersonal communications; less is known about the effects that localized events, personally experienced by people, have on political decisions. The few studies that do focus on the effects of localized events have produced mixed findings (Hopkins 2018). Studies of preference formation in the realm of gun politics often find that voters’ outlooks are resistant to new developments (Hassell, Holbein, and Baldwin 2020; Jang 2019; Kantack...