Conclusions: Perverse Social Capital as a Cause of High Violence in the Barrios of Caracas

Abstract

Venezuela’s politico-economic macrostructure puzzled the explanation of violence—measured through annual homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants—in the barrios of Caracas because this outcome behaved pro-cyclically from the early 2000s until 2011. Urban violence rates behaved pro-cyclically during this time because homicide rates rose or remained extremely high, while socioeconomic indicators improved. High urban violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions created a theoretical puzzle for the structural analysis of violence rates in the barrios of Caracas, as its behavior countered the mechanism established by the relevant literature (Cook and Zarkin 1985; Florence and Barnett 2013, 307–309; Rosenfeld et al. 2013, 2–3; Zubillaga 2013, 108–109). To explain this puzzle, the theoretical model proposed by this book followed Heidrun Zinecker’s distinction between the macrostructures making cases like the barrios of Caracas susceptible to high urban violence and the substructures leading to actual high urban violence rates (Zinecker 2014, 42–43). Therefore, this book abductively analyzed the moderating role of social capital between the politico-economic predictor variable of institutional-anomie created by rent-cum-marginality and the outcome of urban violence (see Chaps. 1 and 2). The main conclusion of this book is that a perverse composition of social capital—due to high social network density in all studied barrios and low collective efficacy in the high violence barrios—explained high urban violence rates while socioeconomic indicators behaved pro-cyclically.