The Comparative Lethality of Two World Regions: An Examination of Divergent Homicide Trends in Latin American and European Nations

• In Event: Trends in and Explanations of Cross-National Violence Rates

Abstract

Within recent decades, homicide rates in Latin American nations have strongly diverged from those of European nations, the former experiencing a sharp increase in the last two decades, while the latter have experienced the oft-characterized “modern crime decline” (LaFree, Curtis, & McDowall, 2015; Lappi-Seppälä & Lehti, 2014; Shaw, van Dijk, & Rhomberg, 2003). However, few studies have endeavored to explain this discrepancy, and many that do (Neopolitan, 1994) often attribute any differences to a regional dummy variable that characterizes some unique phenomenon occurring in the region (i.e. machismo) without modeling specifically for levels of said phenomenon. As such, this study uses a panel extension of well-known homicide model (Land, McCall, & Cohen, 1990) in time series analyses to understand and characterize the differences between these two regions. As such, this project examines each region in separate models to understand how the effects of social disorganization, strain, opportunity, and modernization might impact homicide differently in each region to bring about such drastic differences in homicide rates over the last few decades by using a long time series (1950-2015) to characterize these differences.

Author

• Karise M. Curtis, University at Albany, SUNY