اثر فقر و حمایت اجتماعی بر روی میزان قتل در سطح ملی: اثرات مستقیم و تعدیلی

Social protection is the ability of a government to insulate its citizens from the problems associated with poverty and market forces that negatively affect their quality of life. Prior research shows that government policies that provide social protection moderate the influence of inequality on national homicide rates. Recent research, however, reveals a strong association between poverty and national homicide rates. Further, theory and evidence suggest that social protection policies are meant to aid in providing a subsistence level of living, and thus to alleviate the vagaries of poverty not inequality. To this point, however, no studies have examined the potentially moderating effect of social protection on the strength of the association between poverty and homicide rates cross-nationally. We do so in the present study. Employing data for the year 2004 from a sample of 30 nations, we estimate a series of weighted least squares regression models to test three hypotheses: the association between poverty and homicide will remain significant and positive when controlling for social protection, social protection will have a significant negative direct effect on national homicide rates, and social protection will diminish the strength of the poverty–homicide association. The results provided evidence supporting all three hypotheses. We situate our findings in the cross-national empirical literature on social structure and homicide and discuss our results in the theoretical context of social protection.

Poverty is one of the most consistent predictors of homicide rates in the empirical literature on the structural covariates of violent crime in the United States (Messner and Rosenfeld, 1999, Pridemore, 2002 and Sampson and Lauritsen, 1994). After a long absence in the analogous cross-national literature, a small number of recent studies have shown a positive and significant association between poverty and national homicide rates (Paré, 2006, Pridemore, 2008 and Pridemore, 2011). Prior to this recent research on poverty, inequality had been the focus of many cross-national studies of homicide (for reviews see LaFree, 1999 and Messner and Rosenfeld, 2006). As such, several studies that examined the potential buffering effects of social protection and related phenomena like decommodification (Esping-Andersen, 1990) concentrated on the ability of these constructs to moderate the effects of inequality on national homicide rates (Messner and Rosenfeld, 2006, Pratt and Godsey, 2002 and Savolainen, 2000). While empirical results largely support this hypothesis, theoretical questions remain about the inequality-homicide association and exactly what social protection policies are meant to alleviate.