Poverty Matters: A Reassessment of the Inequality-Homicide Relationship in Cross-National Studies

Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia

“…On the other hand, officially measured homicide rates tend to undercount homicide in the countries where it is worst and most militarised, as we saw with failures to count disappearances as homicides in El Salvador. With homicide, high income inequality is consistently associated with high homicide rates (Braithwaite and Braithwaite 1980;Fajnzylber et al 2000;Hsieh and Pugh 1993;Nivette 2011; but see Pare and Felson 2014; 15 Pridemore 2011). 16 Evidence of low-income countries having more crime has historically been inconsistent, although in recent decades it has become quite a consistent pattern that the high-income societies of Western Europe and East Asia have extremely low homicide rates.…”

¿Explican las características macro-contextuales los índices individuales de desviación adolescente? Un estudio en nueve países

“…Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002), and it represents the goal of the current investigation. It is important to note that this is unique and quite different from work done by Pridemore (2011) and others as in this work, measures of homicide are based on official statistics, and not self reports as is the case here. Our specific research goals and questions were as follows: 1.…”

“…We are unaware of any similar previous work that has linked the two in this manner as most comparative scholarship based on self-reported data has been largely descriptive (e.g., Enzmann et al, 2010) or it has exclusively focused on predictors and dependent measures based on country-level, official data (Pridemore, 2011).…”

“…It is worth noting that Bennet and Lynch (1990) documented similar country rank ordering for levels of crime across data sets, but that "the use of one data set instead of another will in all probability produce different findings and give rise to different conclusions" (p. 172). Some of these tested country-level predictors have included rates of single parenthood (Barber, 2004(Barber, , 2007, adolescent perceptions of the seriousness of deviance (Tyson & Hubert, 2003), economic assistance or social welfare spending (Savage, Bennett, & Danner, 2008), social class and economic conditions (Antonaccio & Tittle, 2007;Axenroth, 1983;Pridemore, 2011;Pridemore & Trent, 2010), social institutions (Newman, 1977), individual or population based genetic differences (Rushton, 1995;cf., Roberts & Gabor, 1990), level of religious engagement (Ellis & Peterson, 1996), and suicide rates among the elderly (Shah, 2008). Across these studies, findings have provided rather modest evidence for the link between national-level predictors and national-level rates of crime, violence, or victimization across countries.…”

“…They developed a list of unanswered questions asking to what extent macro-contextual factors impact local crimes, including levels of unemployment, gun ownership, judiciary or legislative changes, or whether violence is more common in frontier societies. Not much has changed since that time, and we still do not know how, or to what extent, macrolevel influences impact individual behaviors, with some notable exceptions on studies linking macro-level data (inequality) to homicide rates cross-nationally (e.g., Nivette, 2011;Pridemore, 2011;Pridemore & Trent, 2010). Although macro-level processes have been hypothesized as impacting individual-level behavior (Bronfenbrenner, 1989), not much empirical evidence has been brought to bear on the issue of whether macro-level characteristics impact individual-level variability in deviance.…”