The Public Salience of Crime, 1960-2014: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis

• In Event: Social Issues in Criminal Justice and Punishment

Abstract

The public salience of crime has wide-ranging political and social implications; it influences public trust in the government and citizens’ everyday routines and interactions, and may affect policy responsiveness to criminal justice attitudes. Identifying the sources of crime salience is thus important. Two competing theoretical models exist: the objectivist model and the social constructionist model. According to the first, crime salience is a function of the crime rate. According to the second, crime salience is a function of media coverage and political rhetoric, not the crime rate, and trends in crime salience differ across population subgroups due to differences in their responsiveness to elite initiatives. Theoretically, however, period-level variables are only part of the story. Variation in crime salience may also reflect age and cohort effects. To shed light on these issues, we estimate hierarchical age-period-cohort (HAPC) models with data from 422,504 respondents interviewed between 1960 and 2014. The findings show that: (1) crime salience varies mostly at the period level, (2) crime salience trends are parallel across demographic, socioeconomic, and partisan groups, and (3) within every population subgroup, the crime rate exerts a statistically significant and sizable positive effect on crime salience that is mediated by media coverage.

Authors

• Luzi Shi, University at Albany, SUNY

• Yunmei Lu, University of South Florida

• Justin Pickett, University at Albany, SUNY