Social Capital and Homicide

Abstract

Despite recent theoretical attention to "social capital"and its impact on a range of publicproblems, including crime, few studies haveevaluated the relationship between crimerates and levels of social capital across populations. That research gap isdue, in part, to theabsence ofmacro-level empirical indicators ofsocial capital. In thisarticle, we measure social capital asa latentconstruct withaggregated votingand organizational membership data, and surveydata on social trust, and examine its relationship with homiciderates for a nationallyrepresentative sampleofgeographic areas. Structural equation models showthat the construct ofsocial capital hasa significant direct effect on homicide rates, net ofotherstructural covariates, and controlling for the reciprocal influenceofhomicideon social capital. Although social capital mediates little ofthe effect on homicide of levels ofeconomic deprivation, it explains morethan two-thirds of the effect of Southern regional location. The results indicate that depleted social capital contributes to high levels of homicide, andprovide a promising basis forfuture research on the mechanisms linkingsocial capital to crimeat the macro level.