FLUCTUATING CRIME
JONNY STEINBERG: Is political instability linked to a higher homicide rate?
Why homicide rates go up and down has befuddled criminologists for generations. Nobody predicted that in the 1960s, when economic growth was soaring and people were getting rich, North Americans would begin killing one another at rates never recorded before. And criminologists were left dumbfounded when, in the 1990s, the murder rate suddenly fell to historic lows across the developed world. Homicide keeps showing scholars how little they know. Students of homicide have nonetheless recently stumbled across something that is genuinely new and exciting. In some times and places, murder rates are enormously sensitive to shifts in the political climate. The sociologist Roger Gould, for instance, found that in 19th-century France every period of political instability — in 1830-31, 1848-50 and 1870-71 — was accompanied by a spike in homicide, even in parts where there was no political violence and life went on as before. And during periods when government legitimacy rose, such as when leg...
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