There has been much recent public discourse concerning violent crime in metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most recent example is U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy U.S. National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to tamp down what his administration argues is a crime epidemic in the city. Citing reductions in Washington, D.C., crime since 2023, Democratic legislators have referred to Trump’s decision as political theater. Deciphering the political rhetoric can be difficult. On the one hand, the homicide rate (i.e., homicides per 100,000 population) in Washington, D.C., is, according to a recent report by Newsweek, about 2.5 times the U.S. national homicide rate. In this sense, it seems objectively true that Washington, D.C., is a dangerous city. On the other hand, if the Congressional district in which one resides includes either St. Louis or Baltimore, for example, where homicide rates are 4.1 and three times that in Washington, D.C., respectively, then the nation’s capital may seem relatively safe.
New research by Turner College economists Frank Mixon, Director of the Center for Economic Education, and Fady Mansour, Director of the Butler Center for Research and Economic Development, along with Auburn University's Steve Caudill, points out that the impact of violent crime has been shown to extend to business confidence, the timing and types of employment, and investments in human capital. These researchers also indicate that the impact of violent crime on human behavior also potentially touches upon whether U.S. Representatives perform their legislative responsibilities or instead engage in shirking behavior. More specifically, the current political debate surrounding violent crime in Washington, D.C., gives rise to an interesting question: Do U.S. Representatives who reside in and represent notably dangerous Congressional districts view the nation’s capital as a refuge from the violent crime that is persistent in those districts? To address this question, the authors examined absenteeism or vote-skipping across roll call voting during the 118th Congress (2023-2025), holding constant legislator sex, tenure, political party, political ideology, and misconduct, and paying special attention to the role played by violent crimes, measured by gun homicides per 100,000 population, occurring in one's Congressional district.
Traditional regression results presented in the study suggest that longer-serving Representatives, and those facing misconduct investigations, tend to skip a greater percentage of roll-call votes in the U.S. House than their counterparts. The researchers attribute the former result to the greater name recognition and electoral safety that longer-serving Representatives enjoy relative to their more recently elected counterparts, while the latter result is consistent with the notion that legislators who face misconduct allegations and investigations become embroiled in legal and public relations battles that consume much of their work weeks. Their results also suggest that Representatives from notably dangerous Congressional districts (i.e., those where gun homicide rates exceed the mean gun homicide rate by two standard deviations or more) skip 0.688-percentage points fewer votes, representing 26.9% of the mean percentage of skipped votes across the entire U.S. House, than Representatives from all other Congressional districts. Lastly, for a more causal result, the authors compare the vote-skipping by Representatives from notably dangerous districts to the vote-skipping by a synthetic control group of Representatives who are nearly identical yet represent safer districts. According to propensity score matching results, Representatives from notably dangerous Congressional districts tend to skip almost 0.9 percentage points fewer votes than Representatives from all other Congressional districts. This impact represents almost 35% of the mean percentage of votes skipped across all legislators in the U.S. House during the 118th Congress.
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