Non-Native Politicians

A group of politicians build their careers representing constituencies different from where they were born or raised, a category referred to here as non-native politicians. This paper asks: do non-native politicians respond to events in their upbringing areas, and if so, how, despite these areas lying outside the constituencies they currently represent? While research on legislative responsiveness has begun to consider how individual characteristics such as gender, education, pre-political careers, or family background shape behavior, little is known about whether non-native politicians respond to events in their upbringing areas while in office. Examining this question highlights a potential source of responsiveness expressed through policy choices, such as roll-call votes, reflecting legislators’ attachments to particular places outside their constituency. This paper focuses on members of the U.S. Congress, including Representatives and Senators, serving in the 103rd to 113th Congresses (1993–2014). I manually collected and compiled the U.S. Members of Congress Life-Path Dataset, which records legislators’ county- and state-level movements from birth to age 35. Politicians are classified as non-native if the state in which they spent the majority of their upbringing in the U.S. up to age 18 differs from the state they later represented. This life-path measure improves on simpler birth-to-represented-state measures by capturing legislators who relocated early in life. Among the sample of Democratic and Republican members born in the U.S., 1,266 politicians are included, of whom 321 are non-native. To investigate the research question, I link non-native politicians’ upbringing counties and constituency states to a comprehensive record of mass shootings in the U.S. and analyze firearms-related roll-call votes. I estimate a Linear Probability Model regressing a legislator’s pro-gun expansion vote (binary) on whether a mass shooting occurred in either their upbringing county or constituency state, using a series of overlapping one- to six-month look-back windows, and including legislator, Congress-chamber, and bill fixed effects. Results show that non-native politicians who spent substantial time in their growing-up areas respond selectively: they vote to restrict access to firearms following shootings in their constituency states over shorter look-back windows, but over longer windows, their votes to restrict firearms in response to shootings in their upbringing areas increase and exceed reactions to constituency-state shootings. Non-native politicians with shorter duration in their upbringing areas show no meaningful responsiveness in either location across any window. This study shows that legislators’ behavior in the office can be shaped by emotional attachments to their upbringing areas, prompting responses to events in those places even when they lie outside their current jurisdictions and no direct material benefits are involved. These attachments are expressed through policy choices, as reflected in roll-call votes, demonstrating that representation can operate through emotional and identity-based channels in addition to constituency or party pressures. More broadly, these findings suggest that early-life ties can persist into office, shaping legislative priorities and the exercise of discretion in ways that complement traditional models of representation, while offering new insight into how personal history and geographic mobility influence variation in political behavior.