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9 Homicide Stud. 3 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/homcst9 and id is 1 raw text is: Ascribed Economic Inequality and Homicide Among Modern Societies Toward the Development of a Cross-National Theory MITCHELL B. CHAMLIN University of Cincinnati JOHN K. COCHRAN University of South Florida Although a great number of studies have established, through a variety of methodologies, the existence of a positive association between economic inequality and homicide rates cross-culturally, none, in our view, have offered a sound theoretical explanation for this association. Almost all of these accounts suffer from problems of reductionism in that they offer social-psychological explanations for macro-social phenomena. They also pro- vide explanations that cannot be logically extended to the crime of homicide, which can- not be falsified due to the lack of the data necessary to critically test them and/or are lim- ited to the United States but cannot logically be extended cross-nationally. In this article, the authors offer a solution to this problem that avoids invoking reductionist explana- tions. This macro-social approach distinguishes between achieved and ascribed bases of economic inequality, arguing that variations in cross-national rates of homicide among modern societies are best explained by high levels of ascribed economic inequality. Keywords: economic inequality; macro-theory; homicide; legitimacy This article is concerned with the relationship between economic inequality and homicide among nation-states. Our interest rests not with the empirical status of the association between these two concepts. After all, the extant research is inordinately clear and consistent. Beginning in the 1970s, numerous studies have reported that countries that suffer from higher levels of income inequality tend to experience higher levels of homicide. More- over, this finding seems to hold across alternative measures of economic deprivation and homicide, across researchers, across model specifications, and across time (cf. Avison & Loring, 1986; HOMICIDE STUDIES, Vol. 9 No. 1, February 2005 3-29 DOI: 10.1177/1088767904271432 @ 2005 Sage Publications 3

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