Inequality, poverty and homicide: Cross-national evidence

The positive association between income inequality and homicide is one of the most consistently reported findings in the literature on cross-national homicide rates, although there remains a lack of clarity around the causal mechanisms that link the two. This chapter considers the extent to which national homicide rates are differentially associated with income inequality, perceptions of income inequality, perceptions of other types of social inequality (based on demographic factors and social strata), and poverty. Statistical results are presented in a Bayesian framework allowing for a more nuanced quantification of the relative importance of inequality and poverty than has been previously provided. The analysis suggests that variation in cross-national homicide rates is related to a range of measures of inequality; however, the strength of those relationships varies depending on the exact specification of the model employed to study them. Nevertheless, poverty is found to have a stronger relationship with homicide than any measure of inequality. Given that the relationship between inequality and homicide varies depending on the measures employed, and the wider model considered, this suggests that causal explanations linking inequality and homicide should be specific to the form of inequality, and wider context of the relationship, under consideration.