Understanding Cross-National Variation Research Paper

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Cross-national inquiry can make several distinctive contributions to the understanding of criminal violence. One, it permits an assessment of variability in levels and patterns of violent crime. In his classic discussion of the “normality of crime,” Durkheim (1964:66) argued that crime is “closely connected with the conditions of all social life,” leading him to conclude that a society without crime is inconceivable. The same may very well hold true for violent crime in contemporary nations. Coercive action has intrinsic utility for obtaining compliance from others, and thus a certain degree of violence may be an inevitable feature of complex forms of social organization. Nevertheless, cross-national research elucidates the range of possibilities for minimizing levels of criminal violence.

Two, cross-national inquiry is indispensable for establishing the generality of theories of violence and the need for any scope conditions (Kohn 1987). As Lilly et al. (1989:11) observe, “social context plays a critical role in nourishing certain ways of theorizing about crime.” The substantive content of theories of criminal violence, therefore, reflects to a large degree what “makes sense” to criminologists given the specific environments with which they are familiar. Therefore, the causal processes depicted in criminological theories may in fact be limited in scope to a restricted set of sociocultural situations. The application of theories of violence beyond the confines of a single nation provides an opportunity to distinguish between causal processes that are truly general and those that vary by the larger national context.

Three, cross-national inquiry permits an assessment of the role of macrosocial factors in the explanation of criminal violence. Criminological research, especially in the United States, is most commonly conducted at the individual level of analysis. This kind of research is directed towards answering the question: “what is it about individuals that explains their behavior” (Short 1985:53). While such inquiry is without question valuable in criminology, it is also important to consider how basic features of social organization such as demographic structures, institutional arrangements, and broad cultural orientations help explain violent crime. These kinds of variables are by their very nature properties of large-scale aggregates rather than of individual persons. Moreover, to discover the causal significance of such macro-level properties, it is necessary to observe variation in violence across aggregate units.

The present essay is restricted to research dealing with nation-states. As Ember and Ember (1995) explained, two general types of comparative research can be distinguished: cross-national and cross-cultural. Cross-national research compares politically organized entities, whereas cross-cultural research is directed towards “societies” in the larger anthropological sense, that is, populations that occupy contiguous territories and share a common language not normally understood by outsiders. In addition, this essay focuses primarily on research that is analytical rather than descriptive and that employs quantitative rather than qualitative techniques. For example, comparative research on genocide, which has adopted primarily qualitative techniques (Straus 2006), is not discussed. The bulk of research on cross-national variation in criminal violence is oriented to testing theoretically derived hypotheses. In recent years, quantitative, theory-testing studies almost always employ multivariate statistics.

Theory

Cross-national research on criminal violence has been informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives. Specific arguments are often complex and multifaceted, which makes it difficult to summarize the theoretical approaches concisely. Nevertheless, previous reviews of the literature have offered typologies of theories that delineate core themes and that overlap to a considerable degree (Neuman and Berger 1988; LaFree 1999; Neapolitan 1997). Building upon these earlier reviews, the various theoretical perspectives can be organized into two general categories reflecting the underlying strategy for theorizing.

One strategy can be labeled macrosociological theorizing. Theories of this type begin with arguments about properties of large-scale social systems and their interrelationships. These system-level properties are then related to criminal violence (and crime more generally) by means of intervening mechanisms suggested by conventional theories of crime. An alternative strategy begins with theoretical explanations developed to account for crime within nations, at the individual-, group-, or neighborhood-level. The specified causal processes are then linked with national characteristics, and the explanations of crime are essentially extrapolated to apply to national crime rates. For convenience, this approach can be referred to as “extrapolative” theorizing about cross-national variation in violent crime.

Macro-Sociological Theories

One of the most influential macro-sociological theories in cross-national research on crime is modernization theory, which draws liberally on the Durkheimian tradition. Although several prominent proponents of this approach can be identified in the literature (see Eisner 1995, for a review), Louise Shelley (1981) is usually credited with developing the most thorough formulation of the thesis. Modernization theory posits an evolutionary model under which social structures are fundamentally altered, and levels and patterns of criminal activity change, as nations modernize.

The precise nature of the consequences of modernization for crime varies depending on the stage of national development and the offense under consideration. At early stages of urban and industrial growth, traditional social structures are undermined in the growing cities. The concomitant social disorganization, anomie, and weak social control promote increases in property crimes. At the same time the newly arriving migrants from the countryside bring with them traditions of violence associated with rural life, which leads to increases in violent crime. At later stages of development, patterns of crime change. Property crimes continue to rise, becoming the most prominent type of criminal activity. In contrast, the growth in criminal violence subsides as rural migrants become adjusted to urban life. Increasingly, when criminal violence occurs, it does so in the context of the commission of property crimes. In sum, modernization theory posits that changes in levels of criminal violence (and the preponderance of criminal violence relative to property crimes) can be understood with reference to macrosocial processes accompanying societal development.

A second influential argument relevant to the effects of large-scale social change and criminal violence draws upon Elias’ (1978) thesis of the civilizing process. According to this view, societal development entails important changes at both the micro-and macro-level (Eisner 1995; Heiland and Shelley 1991). At the micro-level, personality structures are transformed. Customs and manners are refined, the “threshold of repugnance” against acts of violence is lowered, and action is increasingly guided by internalized self-control. At the macro-level, the institutionalization of capitalist economies renders interpersonal violence largely dysfunctional because such violence undermines the mutual trust upon which markets are based. In addition, the modern nation-state begins to monopolize power, thereby creating a relatively stable framework for social interaction (Neapolitan 1997:71). The clear implication of the civilization thesis is that levels of criminal violence should decrease as nations become more “civilized.”

A third macro-sociological approach to the explanation of cross-national variation in violent crime is dependency/world systems theory (Barak 2001). This perspective is concerned primarily with crime in lesser developed nations. Different variants of the theory have been proposed, but the core claim is that criminogenic conditions within less developed nations arise from the subordinate and dependent position of these nations within the larger world economy. Economic dependency, reflected in conditions such as transnational corporate penetration and trade imbalances, promotes distorted economic and political development. Extreme poverty, inequality, and political oppression characterize subjugated nations. In turn, high levels of criminal violence can be understood as a response to the “frustration and misdirected anger created by deprivation and demoralizing living conditions” (Neapolitan 1997:76). In sum, the distinctive claim associated with dependency theory is that the national conditions that serve as the proximate causes of violent crime must be understood within the context of an inherently exploitive international division of labor.

Finally, recent scholarship has directed attention to processes of capitalist globalization and the emergence of postmodern societies. A common theme in much of this literature is that the expansion of markets and the accompanying triumph of capitalism have unleashed a host of criminogenic forces. These include the spread of rampant individualism (Currie 1991), anomic cultural orientations (Messner and Rosenfeld 2000), the decline of social reforms that previously mitigated the more deleterious consequences of capitalist society (Teeple 1995), and an expansion in the opportunities for organized criminal activities at a transnational level, activities which are often accompanied by violence (Castells 1997).

Extrapolative Theoretical Arguments

Much of the cross-national research on violence does not involve the kind of macro-sociological theorizing just described. Instead, researchers often begin with premises about processes described in conventional criminological theories, and then national characteristics are identified that are suggestive of the operation of these processes. In practice, virtually all of the major sociological theories of crime have been applied in the cross-national literature on criminal violence. This has resulted in a diverse array of hypotheses encompassing a wide range of independent variables. In her research on homicide rates across 18 advanced nations, Gartner (1990) proposed a useful framework for organizing the hypothesized determinants of national crime rates. She observed that explanations of violent crime emphasize some combination of motivations, controls, and/or opportunities for victimization. Applying the extrapolative model of theorizing, national characteristics can be expected to affect levels of criminal violence to the extent that they raise motivations, lower controls, and/or increase opportunities (Gartner 1990:94).

Gartner (1990) proposed that such national characteristics can be grouped into four general types: the material context, the integrative context, the demographic context, and the cultural context. The material context refers to conditions that entail economic deprivation and stress. Variables commonly used to represent the material context include levels of poverty and income inequality and the extensiveness of governmental efforts to alleviate economic stress through welfare policies. The integrative context refers to the strength and depth of social ties that serve to control violent behavior. Common indicators of the integrative context include measures of family structure and racial/ethnic heterogeneity. The demographic context refers to features of population structure. Age distributions, population size and growth, and the sex ratio are major components of the demographic context. The last context – the cultural context – has received the least amount of attention in the research literature because of the difficulty of measuring “culture.” In a few studies, researchers have called attention to the potentially important role of general value orientations (Karstedt 1999; Messner 1982; Smith and Kwong Wong 1989), religious values (Groves et al. 1985), and values supportive of legitimate violence (Gartner 1990).

Empirical Evidence

Cross-national research on crime was very limited prior to (around) 1970, but studies have accumulated steadily since that time. The vast bulk of the contemporary work deals with homicide. Researchers generally agree that the comparability of definitions and the quality of official data are greater for homicide than for other offenses. Most of the quantitative studies of homicide share a basic analytic design. The effects on homicide rates of theoretically strategic national characteristics are assessed in multiple regression equations.

Comprehensive reviews of cross-national empirical research on homicide are available in the literature (Neuman and Berger 1988; LaFree and Kick 1986; LaFree 1999; Messner 2003; Neapolitan 1997). Rather than detailing the results of all studies represented in these previous analyses, the following discussion focuses on general patterns and substantive conclusions.

The Material/Economic Context

Most cross-national studies of homicide include some measure of economic development. Common indicators are Gross National (or Domestic) Product per capita, the prevalence of modern media or communications (telephones, radios, newspapers), energy consumption, the sectoral distribution of employment (e.g., agricultural vs. industrial), and composite indexes of such indicators. The results reported in the research are not entirely consistent, but the general picture is one of null or weak negative effects on homicide rates for measures of economic development.

Numerous studies have also focused on the effects of a related concept: economic deprivation. In these analyses, researchers typically distinguish between “absolute deprivation” and “relative deprivation.” Indicators of absolute deprivation sometimes include the same measures as those used to represent economic development (e.g., GNP/capita). Infant mortality and unemployment rates have also been examined as indicators of absolute deprivation. Indicators of absolute economic deprivation generally fail to exhibit consistent associations with national homicide rates in multivariate models, with the exception of measures of infant mortality (Pridemore 2011).

There is considerable support, however, for the hypothesis that homicide rates vary with the degree of “relative deprivation” as reflected in levels of income inequality. Reviews of cross-national studies relating measures of income inequality and poverty to homicide (e.g., LaFree 1999; Messner 2003) show that, with few exceptions (e.g., Neumayer 2003; Pridemore 2008, 2011), income inequality exhibits significant, positive effects on homicide rates. This relationship is observed across different measures of income inequality (e.g., the Gini coefficient, quintile shares) and different homicide data sources (e.g., Interpol’s International Crime Statistics; the World Health Organization’s World Health Statistics; the United Nation’s World Crime Surveys). The presence of the positive effect is so pervasive that scholars have called “the scale of income differences between rich and poor… the most well-established environmental determinant of levels of violence” (Wilkinson 2004:1).

Most of these studies are based on cross-sectional assessments of the effect of income inequality on homicide, but a few longitudinal analyses have appeared in the literature. Sophisticated statistical procedures have been applied, such as fixed-effects pooled time series techniques (e.g., Jacobs and Richardson 2008; see also Messner et al. 2010). The evidence generally indicates that the widely observed cross-sectional relationship between income inequality and homicide rates is replicated in longitudinal analyses in multivariate analyses with statistical controls for other relevant predictors.

Research has also investigated the possibility that the relationship between income inequality and violent crime depends on other socioeconomic features of nation-states. Pratt and Godsey (2003) discovered an interaction effect between income inequality and social support: as social support increases, the positive effect of income inequality decreases. In addition, Savolainen (2000:1021) found a negative interaction effect between economic inequality and the strength of the welfare state: “nations that protect their citizens from the vicissitudes of market forces appear to be immune to the homicidal effects of economic inequality.”

In a similar vein, a few studies have also examined the direct effects of governmental efforts to provide a safety net via the provision of various social security and welfare benefits. Although the evidence is sparse, the general pattern of findings is consistent. More generous and expansive social welfare policies are associated with lower homicide rates. These effects have been observed for child homicides as well as total homicides and in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses (Fiala and LaFree 1988; Gartner 1990; Messner and Rosenfeld 1997).

The Demographic Context

Most multivariate studies of cross-national variation in homicide rates include measures of population structure and distribution. Researchers drawing on modernization theory commonly examine the effects of urbanism/ urbanization, often measured as the relative size of the population residing in urban areas. The results of these studies are mixed. The bulk of studies report nonsignificant relationships in multivariate models, although several analyses find modest but significant negative relationships.

For the most part, other demographic factors have not emerged as robust predictors. Population size and density typically exhibit weak or null effects. Similarly, measures of age structure (e.g., the proportion of the population in “high-risk” age brackets) and sex ratio are generally non-related to homicide rates. These results are surprising (even with the potential lack of variation in age structure and sex ratio across aggregate units) given the strong associations between criminal violence and age and sex at the individual level. The one demographic factor that has emerged as a significant predictor with a fair degree of regularity is population growth. Several studies report that rapid population growth is associated with high homicide rates (see Messner 2003).

There is also scant but suggestive evidence that demographic factors may interact with other national characteristics to affect homicide rates. One study (Krahn et al. 1986) reported an interaction effect between population density and income inequality. The positive impact of income inequality on homicide rates is higher in the more densely populated nations. Another study (Pampel and Gartner 1995) found that demographic structure interacts with the degree of “collectivism” in society. Increases in the relative size of the young population tend to elevate homicide rates under conditions of weak collectivism.

The Integrative And Cultural Contexts

As noted above, various criminological theories emphasize the importance of social integration and cultural values in the explanation of levels of criminal violence. One common way of operationalizing social integration is with measures of racial/ethnic, linguistic, and/or religious heterogeneity. Such heterogeneity is generally interpreted as a potential source of value conflict and as an impediment to social cohesion. While some studies have found the expected positive effects of indicators of heterogeneity on homicide rates, null effects have often been observed in the literature. The general consensus is that conventional indicators of heterogeneity are at best only weakly related to homicide rates. Similar to some of the results noted above for demographic variables, however, there is some evidence to suggest that heterogeneity may interact with economic inequality to affect homicide rates. Specifically, economic disadvantage that is rooted in group characteristics has been related to high homicide rates.

A few cross-national studies have examined the relationship between divorce rates and homicide. Divorce is often viewed as both a consequence and a cause of weak integration. Once again, the evidence is mixed, with some studies reporting appreciable positive effects and others reporting null effects.

With respect to the potential impact of the cultural context, the research is quite limited. A few studies have reported positive associations between battle deaths and homicide rates and between the use of capital punishment and homicide rates (Archer and Gartner 1984; Gartner 1990; Landau and Pfeffermann 1988). These findings are consistent with the claim that cultural support for the legitimate use of violence is likely to “spill over” and increase the use of illegitimate forms of violence. Similarly, a limited body of evidence relates gun availability to lethal violence (Killias 1992; Walker 1999). Although gun availability is sometimes interpreted as an “opportunity” factor, it has also been interpreted as an indicator of cultural values conducive to violence.

Researchers have also considered the impact of individualistic values on levels of violence. Competing theoretical arguments have been offered about whether individualism is likely to promote or inhibit criminal violence (Currie 1991; Karstedt 1999). The difficulties associated with the measurement of values preclude definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, there is scant but suggestive evidence pointing to the importance of values of “moral individualism.” This value orientation emphasizes a universalistic respect for human rights and independence from strong collective ties (especially kinship and ethnic-group ties). In one of the few efforts to use direct measures of value orientations in cross-national research on criminal violence, Karstedt (1999) reported that a measure of individualism exhibits significant negative effects on homicide rates in multivariate models.

Nonlethal Criminal Violence And “Unofficial” Data Sources

As noted earlier, the majority of quantitative cross-national research on criminal violence has examined homicide rates. Indeed, some have argued that cross-national research should be restricted to homicide because differences in legal definitions and official recording practices render the official data for nonlethal offenses suspect (Neapolitan 1997:38). An important methodological development over the past decades has been the application of survey techniques to overcome limitations associated with official data on nonlethal forms of criminal violence. The most prominent and ambitious of these efforts have been multinational self-report studies of delinquent behavior among youths (Junger-Tas et al. 1994; Gatti et al. 2011) and victimization surveys (van Dijk et al. 2008).

Another advance in this area is the use of multilevel analysis to simultaneously examine individual, structural, and cross-level interaction effects on homicide across nations. For example, Stein (2011) found significant direct effects of individual-level and structural-level measures of opportunity on violent victimization in a multilevel analysis of 45 western industrialized and nonindustrialized countries (see also Stein 2010).

Furthermore, victimization surveys have been used to study the cross-national covariates of intimate partner violence against women. The theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that three factors may decrease national rates of intimate partner violence against women: the empowerment of women through socioeconomic equality, a cultural context (i.e., religion, institutions) that cultivates independence among females, and national globalization (see Ellsberg and Heise 2005; Garc´ıa-Moreno et al. 2005; Johnson et al. 2008; Kaya and Cook 2010).

Given the myriad of methodological difficulties associated with cross-national research on criminal violence, it is not surprising that the literature yields a somewhat cloudy picture. A few generalizations, however, appear warranted. From a purely descriptive standpoint, the evidence demonstrates remarkable cross-national variation in levels of criminal violence, especially in the case of lethal violence. Homicide is a major social problem and a significant cause of mortality in some nations, whereas it is a very rare event in others. Clearly, highly variable levels of violence are compatible with complex forms of social organization.

With respect to the more prominent macro-sociological theories reviewed above, the failure to observe appreciable negative effects of standard indicators of economic development on national levels of lethal violence runs counter to simple versions of modernization theory. In particular, the evidence raises questions about the interconnectedness of different dimensions of modernization and about the utility of strict evolutionary models. The consequences of economic development for levels of criminal violence evidently depend to a considerable degree on the larger historical and cultural context of a nation (Shelley 1986). The finding of weak effects of developmental measures in the cross-national literature also suggests that the theory of a civilizing process offers a better explanation of changes in criminal violence associated with the transformation of agrarian, rural communities into industrial and postindustrial nation-states than it does of variation in violence across such nation-states. Considering dependency theories, the finding of positive effects of income inequality on homicide rates is consistent with an underlying premise of the theory. However, the distinctive prediction of this approach is that deprivation within a nation reflects a dependent position in the international division of labor and that this deprivation statistically interprets the effect of dependency on crime. Few quantitative studies actually consider these claims.

Despite ambiguities about the validity of dependency theory, the research does offer clear evidence indicating the importance of the material context. Not only does income inequality emerge as a significant predictor of cross-national variation in homicides rates but indicators of governmental efforts to protect the citizenry from economic hardship also yield reasonably consistent effects. In contrast, standard demographic factors are less important than might be expected in accounting for cross-national variation in criminal violence. This suggests that simply generalizing from individual-level evidence on violence (e.g., age and gender patterns) to the national level through a simple aggregation process is potentially misleading. Evidently, “contextual” effects can modify in an important ways the purely “compositional” effects associated with relatively large numbers of persons with various demographic statuses. Finally, as noted above, only limited evidence is available concerning the role of social integration and culture. However, when indicators of the integrative and cultural context are statistically significant, they are usually in accord with the predictions of criminological theory (Gartner 1990).

Future Directions

The cross-national research on criminal violence has without question advanced markedly over the course of recent decades. Researchers have become increasingly sensitive to issues of data quality, advanced techniques of causal modeling have been applied in multivariate analyses, and efforts to systematize the literature through comprehensive reviews have appeared. Nevertheless, most scholars in the field concede that knowledge about the reasons for cross-national variation in criminal violence is still at a relatively primitive stage.

The compilation of accurate, reliable, and comparable data on criminal violence continues to be a vexing problem. The efforts of the United Nations to standardize data collection and to enhance participation in its crime survey are encouraging. Nevertheless, the collection of international crime statistics presupposes well-developed criminal justice systems at the national level. Some nations simply lack the reporting infrastructure to provide the data requested by multinational organizations.

Victimization and self-report surveys are largely independent of and circumvent official governmental agencies. Yet these surveys are often expensive to conduct, particularly when samples are nationally representative. Thus, to a considerable extent, advancement in cross-national research on criminal violence will continue to be dependent on progress in the development of national criminal justice systems.

There is also a dilemma surrounding priorities for data collection. Researchers desire highly detailed information from large samples of nations. Yet the two objectives of detail and sample size are in some respects incompatible. Given the limited data-collection infrastructures in many nations (noted above), research on large samples will undoubtedly be limited to broad categories of offenses, such as aggregated rates of selected forms of criminal violence.

Cross-national research on criminal violence is also hindered by limitations in the measurement of strategic independent variables. Most studies employ a fairly standard set of predictors regardless of the theoretical objectives of the research. As Neapolitan (1997:88–89) observed, this has led to troublesome ambiguities in the literature. Diverse concepts are often operationalized by the same measure, and the same measure may be interpreted as reflecting different concepts. This practice is understandable – researchers tend to select measures of national characteristics that are readily available in accessible publications, such as those of multinational organizations. The priorities of these organizations and participating governments, however, do not necessarily coincide with those in the scholarly community. In particular, measures of cultural orientations are not well represented in standard data sources. A key challenge for researchers is to initiate efforts to expand the scope of nationwide data collection to encompass indicators of variables relevant to criminological theories beyond the economic and demographic data that have traditionally been compiled under governmental auspices.

Another important methodological challenge for cross-national researchers is to design, implement, and assess interventions. While a body of literature based on correlational designs has accumulated steadily, comparable efforts to conduct field experiments and intervention assessments have yet to emerge on a significant scale (Weiner and Ruback 1995:180–181; see also Eisner et al. 2012). Such research has particular significance for the development of social policies to deal with the problem of violence.

There is also a pressing need for theoretical development in the field. For the most part, researchers have drawn upon existing criminological theories to identify potentially important independent variables, but the nature of the relationships between these variables and levels of violence has not been stated with much precision. For example, with few exceptions, researchers implicitly assume simple additive, linear relationships (see Gartner 1995), or “impose” nonlinearities for methodological reasons. Theoretical rationales for nonlinear relationships warrant greater theoretical attention. Similarly, as noted, several studies have detected interaction effects of various national characteristics on levels of violence. These effects are typically observed in exploratory analyses and are “under theorized.” An important task for the future is to incorporate interactions more systematically into theorizing about criminal violence.

More generally, researchers should devote greater efforts to explain the mechanisms that link independent variables and national rates of violence. At best, researchers provide a theoretical rationale for anticipating an association between some national characteristics and rates of criminal violence, but alternative interpretations for the same predictions are usually possible. The precise nature of the hypothetical processes needs to be specified so that distinctive implications of different theoretical arguments can be derived.

A final task worthy of concerted attention in the future is the incorporation of diffusion processes into theories of cross-national violence. There has been a growing interest in spatial analyses of violent crime in the “within-nation” literature over recent years, and sophisticated spatial econometric techniques have been developed to identify diffusion or contagion processes in multivariate models. Moreover, evidence indicates pronounced differences in levels of violence across major regions of the world, which is consistent with diffusion processes. Further theorizing about the possible diffusion of violence is particularly important given the growing recognition that issues of crime and criminal justice increasingly transcend national borders.

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