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Legislator Responsiveness to Mass Shootings via Stacked Difference-in-Differences on Roll-Call Ideal Points

An empirical design measuring whether mass shootings shift U.S. state legislators' firearm-policy positions: roll-call votes are scaled into latent gun-policy ideal points, and a stacked difference-in-differences estimator identifies the causal effect of a nearby mass shooting on those positions, yielding a precise average null across multiple states.

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Are Politicians Responsive to Mass Shootings? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures∗ Haotian Chen†

An empirical political-economy study of whether mass shootings change how U.S. state legislators vote on firearm policy. The authors scale legislators' roll-call votes on firearm bills into latent gu…