Scots-Irish Women and the Southern Culture of Violence: The Influence of Scots-Irish Females on High Rates of Southern Violence

Abstract

Prior research has documented a higher rate of violent crime within the South relative to other U.S. regions. Some scholars argue that higher rates of violence in the South are due to the lasting effect of the unique culture of the Scots-Irish immigrants that came into the U.S. in the mid-1700's. Though there is a large body of literature examining the link between culture and violence in the South, an implicit assumption of this line of study is that the cultural effect occurs largely within the white male population in rural Southern areas. No study, to our knowledge, has extended this thesis to females. We address this omission in prior analyses by empirically testing the Southern Culture of Violence thesis using female arrest rates. Drawing on countylevel ancestry data from the 2000 Census and UCR Supplementary Homicide Report data, we estimate a series of negative binomial regression models. A conclusion and discussion of the results follow. Over the past two decades scholars have devoted a great deal of effort to understanding the role of culture in rates of homicide in the Southern region of the U.S. (Ellison 1991; Huff-Corzine, Corzine, and Moore 1986; Lofton and Hill 1974; Messner 1983a). Historically, the South has always exhibited higher rates of violence since the late 1700’s (Gastil 1971; Hackney 1969). When seeking to explain this enduring regional difference, many scholars attribute high rates of violence to the lingering effects of a unique culture that the Scots-Irish immigrants brought with them when they migrated to the Southern United States (McWhiney 1988; Sowell 2005; Webb 2005).