Do inequalities predict fear of crime? Empirical evidence from Mexico

Abstract

• This paper examines the causal impact of municipal income and education inequality on fear of crime. • Fear of crime is operationalized with a composite index combining the emotive, cognitive and behavioral dimensions. • Income inequality has a strong positive impact on fear of crime, especially on the emotive and behavioral components. • Education inequality positively affects the emotive and cognitive components but the effect is however less stable. Deeply rooted in the social disorganization theory, this article aims at studying the causal impact of local inequality, a main community structural factor, on individuals’ fear of crime. Combining multiple datasets and focusing on the Mexican case, this study has several goals. First, we construct an innovative index of fear of crime composed of three dimensions: emotion, cognition and behavior. Second, we build measures of income and education inequality representative at the municipal level. Lastly, we assess the causal effect of inequalities on fear of crime, controlling both for the hierarchical structure of the data and endogeneity bias relying on two-stage least squares (2SLS) multilevel models. Our results suggest a strong positive linear relationship between municipal income inequality and fear of crime. However, the observed effect is stronger for the emotive and behavioral dimensions. Concerning education inequality, we also find a positive impact on feeling of unsafety (emotive dimension), but of smaller magnitude, and on risk perception (cognitive dimension). While our results are robust to different robustness checks for income inequality, they are less stable for education inequality.