RESUMEN
As public mass shootings continue to plague the United States, a growing scholarly literature seeks to understand the political effects of these tragic events. This literature, however, focuses on public opinion or turnout and vote choice, leaving open to question whether or not public mass shootings affect a range of other important actions citizens may take to engage with gun policy. Leveraging the as-good-as random timing of high-publicity public mass shootings over the past decade and an immense array of publicly available and proprietary data, we demonstrate that these events consistently cause surges in public engagement with gun policy-including internet searches, streaming documentaries, discussion on social media, signing petitions, and donating to political action committees. Importantly, we document the behaviors where shootings induce polarizing upswings in engagement and those where upswings skew toward gun control. Finally, we demonstrate that low-publicity shootings largely exert little-to-no effect on our outcomes.
RESUMEN
Can exposure to discernible economic benefits associated with the presence of a high-socioeconomic status immigrant group reduce xenophobic and antiforeigner attitudes? We explore this question using the case of Chinese internationals in the United States and an exogenous influx of foreign capital associated with their presence. Using a difference-in-differences design with panel data, along with analyses of pooled cross-sectional data, we find that immigration attitudes, as well as views towards China, became more positive over time among Americans residing in locales whose economies were stimulated by Chinese foreign investments. Our findings have implications for research on public attitudes towards immigration in an era of growing flows of high-socioeconomic status immigrants to the United States and other immigrant-receiving nations.