Assessing Messner and Rosenfeld's Institutional Anomie Theory: A Partial Test*

Abstract

In Crime and the American Dream, Messner and Rosenfeld contend that culturally and structurally produced pressures to secure monetary rewards, coupled with weak controls from noneconomic social institutions, promote high levels of instrumental crime. Empirically, they suggest that the effects of economic conditions on profit‐related crime depend on the strength of noneconomic institutions. This investigation evaluates this proposition with cross‐sectional data for U.S. states. In brief; the nonlinear models show considerable, indirect support for Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory, revealing that the effects of poverty on property crime depend on levels of structural indicators of the capacity of noneconomic institutions to ameliorate the criminogenic impact of economic deprivation. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Local Politics and Violent Crime in U.S. Cities*

“…Similarly, Chamlin and Cochran (1995), in a state-level test of institutional anomie, found that the effect of poverty on property crime decreased as voter turnout increased. Thus, these studies suggest that crime depends on the relative strengths of political and economic institutions.…”

“…However a recent reformulation of anomie theory-institutional anomie theory-suggests that the impact of the economy on crime depends on the relative strengths of economic and non-economic institutions such as the polity Rosenfeld, 1997a, 1997b). Cross-national (Savolainen, 2000) and state-level research (Chamlin and Cochran, 1995) testing institutional anomie theory suggests that politics can have direct and conditional effects on crime. In addition, other recent research suggests that aspects of local politics such as the race of the mayor can have direct effects on interracial homicide (Jacobs and Wood, 1999), police killings of minorities (Jacobs and O'Brien, 1998) and violence against police (Jacobs and Carmichael, 2002).…”

Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

“…Several prior structural-level studies have employed voter turnout to represent various concepts potentially related to crime and violence, including civic engagement (Chamlin and Cochran 1995;Rosenfeld, Messner, and Baumer 2001), political disaffection (Callahan 1998), and level of conformity with norms (Coleman 2002). For whom an electorate votes, however, may be an even more important indicator of larger social forces than voter turnout, especially in the midst of a political transition.…”

What Explains Criminal Violence in Mexico City? A Test of Two Theories of Crime

“…However, Thus, when social institutions -whether economic, political, or cultural -are threatened, strained or collapse, crime is more likely (Figure 2). The relationship between the strength of social institutions and aggregated crime rates is tested in different countries and for different crimes (Messner and Rosenfeld 1997;Chamlin and Cochran 1995;Piquero and Piquero 1998;Savolainen 2000;Maume and Lee 2003;Schoepfer 2004;Kim and Pridemore 2005;Bjerregaard and Cochran 2008;Stults and Baumer 2008). Overall, the studies reviewed tend to support the theory.…”