Political Restraint of the Market and Levels of Criminal Homicide: A Cross-National Application of Institutional-Anomie Theory

Abstract

This article examines the effects on national homicide rates of political efforts to insulate personal well-being from market forces. Drawing upon recent work by EspingAndersen and the institutional-anomie theory of crime, we hypothesize that levels of homicide will vary inversely with the of labor. We develop a measure of decommodification based on levels and patterns of welfare expenditures and include this measure in a multivariate, cross-national analysis of homicide rates. The results support our hypothesis and lend credibility to the institutional-anomie perspective. The degree of decommodification is negatively related to homicide rates, net of controls for other characteristics of nations. Interest in explaining differences among nations in rates of crime and violence is as old as the sociology of crime itself. The quantitative measurement of these differences by the nineteenth-century moral statisticians Quetelet and Guerry marks the beginning of scientific criminological inquiry (Beirne 1993). Marx also refers to national crime data in the course of developing his critique of the inherent flaws of capitalism. There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system, Marx (1859) writes, which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery, and increases in crimes even more rapidly