Date of Award

1-1-2018

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

School of Criminal Justice

Content Description

1 online resource (ii, v, 180 pages) : illustrations.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

David McDowall

Committee Members

Alan Lizotte, Colin Loftin, Steve Messner, William Pridemore

Keywords

Europe, Homicide, Latin America, Murder, Time series, Violence

Subject Categories

Criminology

Abstract

Within recent decades, homicide rates in Latin American nations have strongly diverged from those of European nations. The former experienced a sharp increase in the last two decades, while the latter have experienced the oft-characterized “modern crime decline.” However, few studies have endeavored to explain this divergence, and many that do often attribute any differences to a regional dummy variable said to characterize 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 a well-known homicide model (Land, McCall, & Cohen, 1990) in a long time series (1980-2015) to characterize the differences between these two regions, so as to understand how the effects of social disorganization, strain, opportunity, modernization, and other phenomena impacted homicide rates in these two regions. The project also considers, through a separate exploratory analysis, other theoretical inquiries from the international homicide literature that have been developed since the Land, McCall, & Cohen (1990) publication. As such, the two analyses contribute methodologically and theoretically to the cross-national homicide literature while serving to explain the divergence between homicide rates in both regions.

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