Protest and State Policy Agendas: Marches and Gun Policy After Parkland (Under Review)

Protest and State Policy Agendas: Marches and Gun Policy After Parkland (Under Review)" summary: “Does protest spur the government to act at the regional or local level? While existing work finds that protest activity affects the behavior of national legislators, surprisingly, little work exists on the effects of protest on subnational level legislation. Gun control in the United States offers a promising case for studying this question, due to considerable variation in both protest and policymaking activity across the 50 states following the mass shooting in Parkland, FL in early 2018. We use an original monthly panel dataset of progress on both gun control and pro-gun legislation in all states between 2017 and 2019, paired with monthly protest march data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, to determine whether or not protest spurred state governments to act on gun control. We find that marches advocating gun control are associated with an increased likelihood of legislative movement and enactment on gun control, though they do not appear to discourage action that loosens gun laws. On the other side, pro-gun marches do not seem to have the desired effect, and may even spark a legislative backlash.