Ep 70. School shooting increases congressional campaign funding by 2820%
Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (api.substack.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
Guests: Eric A. Baldwin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Donohue Lab at Stanford University and Takuma Iwasaki is a doctoral candidate at Stanford Law School and a graduate researcher at Stanford Data Science.
Paper: School shootings and the strategic contributions of gun policy PACs in US House elections
Abstract: The American public consistently supports stricter gun laws. We show that the gun lobby is most concerned that this support will translate into federal legislative action when fatal school shootings occur. Leveraging a dataset of political action committee (PAC) contributions and school shootings, we implement a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate the causal effect of fatal school shootings on contributions to House candidates.
* Political Action Committees increase contributions by 31% to candidates in districts with fatal school shootings, and 20% for gun safety PACs. Neither show any significant response to nonfatal school shootings or mass shootings.
* For both progun and gun safety PACs, contribution spikes emerge in the wake of fatal school shootings, with effects dramatically amplified as Election Day approaches
* When a shooting occurs within two months of Election Day, contributions from progun PACs increase by 2,820% while gun safety PAC contributions increase by 917%.
These effects are concentrated in competitive districts (5% margins) where the two-sided surge in contributions offsets any measurable electoral impact. These results provide robust evidence that PACs strategically deploy contributions after school shootings, with the magnitude and timing suggesting a deliberate mobilization to advance its agenda. Our findings underscore a gap in democratic accountability: While public opinion should drive policy change, campaign contributions are wielded to blunt electoral responsiveness, providing insight into the inability of Congress to adopt broadly supported gun safety measures.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Get full access to Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security at riedmanreport.substack.com/subscribe