Perceived Inequality and Cross-National Homicide Rates

Abstract

Economic inequality is a persistent structural covariate of cross-national homicide rates. The most common criminological explanation is that perceived inequality creates frustration among individuals at the lower end of the income distribution, this frustration generates latent anger, and this anger occasionally results in violence. There are reasons to question the validity of this explanation. First, the theoretical reasoning of this population-level phenomenon is reductionist, relying on individual-level explanation. Second, perceived inequality is poorly operationalized by its most common measure, the Gini index, meaning this hypothesis is never actually directly tested. Third, the Gini index is strongly correlated with inequality’s main competing economic explanation, poverty. To address these limitations we used the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Programme to obtain national-level measures of perceived inequality that are much more consistent with the proposed theoretical construct and weakly correlated with poverty. Controlling for a range of structural covariates we found no consistent evidence of an association between population-level perceived inequality and homicide rates.