When tragic events occur, such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub mass shooting, we expect such incidents to increase the importance of issues such as gun violence for the public and their desire for government to address them. In new research, Youlang Zhang and Xinsheng Liu look at how “focusing events” affect the public’s desire for government to act. Using the 2016 Orlando nightclub mass shooting as a case study, they find that the while the shooting increased public attention towards terrorism and national security issues, there was no effect on people’s attitudes towards other forms of terrorist attacks, and towards gun control and immigration restriction policies. 

Public opinion is a powerful force in shaping policies and influencing societal outcomes. Over the decades, scholars have sought to understand what makes public opinion stable or susceptible to change. A common consensus is that critical crises or high-profile negative events, known as “focusing events,” can dramatically increase the prominence of certain issues, alter perceptions among the public and policymakers, and lead to significant changes in policy preferences. In new research, we look at how the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub mass shooting—a tragic and widely covered incident—affected public opinion and policy preferences.

Focusing events

Focusing events are sudden, relatively rare, and potentially harmful incidents that simultaneously capture the attention of both policymakers and the public. Their impact is often concentrated in a specific place or community of interest. Several theories about policy processes emphasize the significant role of focusing events in shaping public opinion and policy. For instance, the multiple streams framework, punctuated equilibrium theory, and the advocacy coalition framework all suggest that focusing events can create information ‘shocks’ that reinforce existing indicators, bring hidden issues to the forefront, and influence how issues are defined and who has access to government’s policy agenda.

The 2016 Orlando mass shooting

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and injuring 53 others. This tragic event was one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history and sparked widespread media coverage and public discourse on issues such as terrorism, gun control, and public safety.

Figure 1 below shows our survey data collected immediately before and after the Orlando shooting. This timing allowed us to analyze the causal effects of this focusing event on public opinion with greater precision.

Figure 1 – Google trend search volume index with the keyword “Orlando nightclub shooting” and the distribution of our survey respondents.

How did the Orlando mass shooting shape public opinion?

In the context of the Orlando mass shooting, we argue that public opinion about a focusing event involves at least two layers and four components. The first layer is public attention, which has two key components: general attention to the generic issue (e.g., terrorism and security); and specific attention to sub-issues (e.g., an armed attack on civilians, a bomb explosion at a public place, a cyber-attack on the power grid, a poisoned water supply, or an attack with a biological weapon) within the issues of terrorism and security.

“Gov. Malloy visits Pulse nightclub memor” (CC BY 2.0) by Office of Governor Dan Malloy

The second layer is the public’s policy preference, which also has two main components: support for more government action (e.g., government investment or effort in response to various threats within the terrorism domain); and support for specific policy proposals or instruments (e.g., stricter gun control vs. stricter immigration control) to prevent a similar event in the future.

As Figure 2 shows, building on this framework, we suggest that the influences of focusing event on public opinion may be analogous to the impacts of a stone cast into a pond (i.e., causing a splash and ripples but no effect on the deep-water dynamics).

Figure 2 – How focusing events shape public opinion

A series of statistical analyses show that the Orlando mass shooting event significantly increased public attention towards generic terrorism and national security (i.e., the splash effect), as well as public support for more government spending on preventing terrorist attacks targeting civilian populations (i.e., the limited ripple effect). However, there is no evidence to support the effect of this focusing event on citizens’ attention towards other forms of potential terror attacks (i.e., the limited ripple effect) or their attitudes towards specific policy instruments such as stricter gun control policies or immigration restriction policies (i.e., the deep-water null effect). Instead, attention to other potential terror attacks and preferences for specific policy instruments were significantly anchored by individual predispositions, particularly people’s existing knowledge and their political party identification.

Even tragic events may not change the public’s policy preferences

Analyzing public responses to violent events can offer crucial insights for policymakers to enhance public security policies, emergency preparedness, communication strategies and response plans. Our findings suggest that even the most tragic mass shooting event may struggle to alter public preferences for specific policy proposals, indicating that polarized partisan politics has significantly hindered the adoption of radically new policies following public crises. These results contribute fresh insights that could enrich both scholarly discourse and policy deliberation about gun control and immigration reform.

• This article is based on the paper, ‘How does a focusing event shape public opinion? Natural experimental evidence from the Orlando mass shooting’, in Policy Studies Journal. 
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.  
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