Socioeconomic Change and Homicide in A Transitional Society

Durkheim argued that rapid social change would produce anomic conditions which, in turn, would lead to increases in criminal and deviant behavior. Russia provides a unique opportunity to test this theory given the large-scale fundamental socioeconomic changes occurring in the nation. Russian homicid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Sociological quarterly 2007-04, Vol.48 (2), p.229-251
Main Authors:	Pridemore, William Alex, Kim, Sang-Weon
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Anomie Crime Crime Rates Criminal sociology. Police. Delinquency. Deviance. Suicide Criminal statistics Criminology Demographic Change Deviant Behavior Deviation Durkheim, Emile Economic Change Effects Foreign investment Homicide Homicide and Its Consequences Homicide rates Indexes Longitudinal studies Mortality Murders & murder attempts Postcommunist Societies Pride Privatization Privilege Regression analysis Russia Russian culture Russian Federation Russian language Social Change Social research Socioeconomic factors Socioeconomics Sociology Sociology of law and criminology Transitions Transnationalism Unemployment Unemployment rates Violent crimes
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Summary:	Durkheim argued that rapid social change would produce anomic conditions which, in turn, would lead to increases in criminal and deviant behavior. Russia provides a unique opportunity to test this theory given the large-scale fundamental socioeconomic changes occurring in the nation. Russian homicide rates more than doubled in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and are now among the highest in the world. The pace and effects of the socioeconomic transition vary widely throughout Russia, however, as do rates of and changes in violent crime. In this study, we took advantage of the unique natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine the association between socioeconomic change and homicide. We measured the negative effects of socioeconomic change by creating an index of changes in population size, unemployment, privatization, and foreign investment. Using data from Russian regions (n = 78) and controlling for other structural covariates, regression results indicated that regions that more strongly experienced the negative effects of socioeconomic change were regions where homicide rates increased the most between 1991 and 2000. Further analysis of the individual components of this index revealed that regions with greater increases in (1) unemployment experienced greater increases in homicide rates and (2) privatization experienced smaller increases in homicide rates.
ISSN:	0038-0253 1533-8525