Beyond sticks and stones: Human capital enhancement efforts in response to violent crime in Latin America

Abstract

Violent crime has been commonplace in Latin America over the past decades. While existing research has made progress in explaining the rationale and outcomes of government coercive strategies against crime, it has overlooked the non‐coercive strategies implemented to improve public security. It is argued in this article that political authorities make human capital enhancement efforts to shape actors’ incentives about criminal activity and mitigate crime. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that violent crime increases human capital enhancement efforts, and that the effect of violent crime on human capital enhancement efforts is larger when left‐oriented governments are in power because they stress actors’ motivations over windows of opportunities as the main drivers of crime. Support for these hypotheses is found in a sample of Latin American democracies in the period 1990–2007.

Can Education Reduce Violent Crime? Evidence from Mexico before and after the Drug War Onset

“…While the expansion of education is important in its own right, the results suggest that policy makers can also expect welfare policies aimed at strengthening the education system to decrease crime (e.g. Eisner, 2015;Rivera & Zarate-Tenorio, 2016). Our analysis indicates that strategies outside law enforcement can also have substantial effects on the reduction of crime in late development countries, where there is ample scope for implementing better welfare policies.…”

How Do Violent Politicians Govern? The Case of Paramilitary-Tied Mayors in Colombia

“…Most closely related to my context, Fergusson et al (2021) propose that, armed with private militias, the traditional elite's loss of elections to excluded left-wing parties in Colombia increases right-wing violence. Scholars hurl similar critiques at militarized security and mano duro (iron-fist) policies, which undermine human rights and replace alternative crime-reduction strategies, such as human capital enhancement and community policing (Ahnen 2007; Arias and Ungar 2009; Rivera and Zarate-Tenorio 2016).…”

“…Similar butter-to-guns trade-offs (and tragedies) have been found to manifest in other contexts (Mintz 1993). Lack of education spending, in particular—shown to be an important antidote to crime—reduces public safety over time (Rivera and Zarate-Tenorio 2016). 14 The election of politicians with coercive linkages therefore serves to dampen crime but has likely detrimental implications for social development.…”

Federal Distributive Politics and the Unequal Distribution of Violence: Argentine Provinces in Comparative Perspective

“…Some recent studies analyse whether there is a relationship between homicides rates and state capacity, including governance indicators, corruption, and state legitimacy (Neumayer, 2003;Nivette and Eisner, 2013), spending in social welfare protection (Bergman and Kessler, 2008;Fearon and Laitin, 2003;Nivette, 2011;Oyefusi, 2008;Rivera and Zárate, 2016), social transfers (Ingram and Da Costa, 2014;Lance, 2014), and spending in security or policing (Archer and Gartner, 1984;Collier, 2007;Ehrlich, 1973;Fajnzylber et al, 1998). Following this discussion, we empirically evaluate whether variations in provincial state capacity are related to changes in homicides rates at this level of government.…”