This research explains the temporal clustering of hate crimes. It is hypothesized that many hate crimes are retaliatory in nature and tend to increase, sometimes dramatically, in the aftermath of an antecedent event that results in one group harboring a grievance against another. Three types of events are used to test and refine the argument: 1) contentious criminal trials involving interracial crimes, 2) lethal terrorist attacks, and 3) appellate court decisions concerning same-sex marriage. The results from time-series analyses indicate that contentious trial verdicts and lethal domestic terrorist attacks precede spikes in racially or religiously motivated hate crimes, whereas less evidence is found for antigay hate crimes after appellate court rulings that grant rights to same-sex partners. The model put forth in this article complements prior work by explaining in part the timing of hate crime clusters.The study of hate crime sits at the intersection of two areas with a rich history in the social sciences-prejudice and criminal behavior. As such,

This paper assesses the extent to which the infant mortality rate might be treated as a “proxy” for poverty in research on cross-national variation in homicide rates. We have assembled a pooled, cross-sectional time-series dataset for 16 advanced nations over the 1993–2000 period that includes standard measures of infant mortality and homicide and also contains information on two commonly used “income-based” poverty measures: a measure intended to reflect “absolute” deprivation and a measure intended to reflect “relative” deprivation. With these data, we are able to assess the criterion validity of the infant mortality rate with reference to the two income-based poverty measures. We are also able to estimate the effects of the various indicators of disadvantage on homicide rates in regression models, thereby assessing construct validity. The results reveal that the infant mortality rate is more strongly correlated with “relative poverty” than with “absolute poverty,” although much unexplained variance remains. In the regression models, the measure of infant mortality and the relative poverty measure yield significant positive effects on homicide rates, while the absolute poverty measure does not exhibit any significant effects. Our analyses suggest that it would be premature to dismiss relative deprivation in cross-national research on homicide, and that disadvantage is best conceptualized and measured as a multidimensional construct.