Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:20:23.003Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Policy Preferences after Crime Victimization: Panel and Survey Evidence from Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Giancarlo Visconti
Giancarlo Visconti*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Purdue University
*
*Corresponding author: Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Can crime victimization increase support for iron-fist crime-reduction policies? It is difficult to assess the political effects of crime, mainly because of the presence of unmeasured confounders. This study uses panel data from Brazil and strategies for reducing sensitivity to hidden biases to study how crime victims update their policy preferences. It also examines survey data from eighteen Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the findings. The results show that crime victims are more likely to support iron-fist or strong-arm measures to reduce crime, such as allowing state repression. Affected citizens are also found to value democracy less, which might explain their willingness to accept the erosion of basic rights in favor of radical measures to combat delinquency. These findings reveal that exposure to crime can change what people think the state should be allowed to do, which can have important political implications.

Keywords

crime victimizationpolicy preferencesdemocratic valuespanel datahidden biases
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 1481 - 1495
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, J et al. (2004) Understanding change and stability in party ideologies: do parties respond to public opinion or to past election results? British Journal of Political Science 34 (4):589–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alesina, AF and Giuliano, P (2009) Preferences for redistribution. Technical report. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arias, D (2006) Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking. Social Networks, and Public Security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ashenfelter, O and Rouse, C (1998) Income, schooling, and ability: evidence from a new sample of identical twins. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 113 (1):253–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bahamonde, H (2017) Aiming right at you: group v. individual clientelistic targeting in Brazil. Journal of Politics in Latin America (forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, A, Ames, B and Renno, LR (2006) Social context and campaign volatility in new democracies: networks and neighborhoods in Brazil’s 2002 elections. American Journal of Political Science 50 (2):382–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, A et al. (2015) Replication data for: The dynamics of partisan identification when party brands change: The case of the workers party in Brazil. Harvard Dataverse.Google Scholar
Baker, A and Greene, KF (2011) The Latin American left’s mandate: free-market policies and issue voting in new democracies. World Politics 63 (1):43–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bateson, R (2012) Crime victimization and political participation. American Political Science Review 106 (03):570–587.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckett, K (1999) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, K and Western, B (2001) Governing social marginality welfare, incarceration, and the transformation of state policy. Punishment and Society 3 (1):43–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berens, S and Dallendörfer, M (2017) Apathy or anger? How crime experience affects individual vote intention in Latin America and the Caribbean. Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Conference, Lima, Peru.Google Scholar
Bowers, J (2011) Making effects manifest in randomized experiments. In Druckman JN et al. (eds), Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 459–480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, A et al. (1960) The American Voter. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Carreras, M (2013) The impact of criminal violence on regime legitimacy in Latin America. Latin American Research Review 48 (3):85–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carreras, M and Pion-Berlin, D (2017) Armed forces, police and crime-fighting in Latin America. Journal of Politics in Latin America 9 (3):3–26.Google Scholar
Cohen, MJ and Smith, AE (2016) Do authoritarians vote for authoritarians? Evidence from Latin America. Research and Politics 3 (4):2053168016684066.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruz, JM (2010) Estado y violencia criminal en America Latina [State and Criminal Violence in Latin America]. Nueva sociedad 226, 67–85.Google Scholar
Dammert, L and Malone, MFT (2006) Does it take a village? Policing strategies and fear of crime in Latin America. Latin American Politics and Society 48 (4):27–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Estrada, F (2004) The transformation of the politics of crime in high crime societies. European Journal of Criminology 1 (4):419–443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez, KE and Kuenzi, M (2010) Crime and support for democracy in Africa and Latin America. Political Studies 58 (3):450–471.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuentes, C (2005) Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerber, MM and Jackson, J (2016) Authority and punishment: on the ideological basis of punitive attitudes towards criminals. Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 23 (1):113–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, MS and Ruback, RB (2012) After the Crime: Victim decision Making Volume 9. Berlin: Springer Science Business Media.Google Scholar
Hainmueller, J (2011) Entropy balancing for causal effects: a multivariate reweighting method to produce balanced samples in observational studies. Political Analysis 20, 25–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho, DE et al. (2007) Matching as nonparametric preprocessing for reducing model dependence in parametric causal inference. Political Analysis 15 (3):199–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland, AC (2013) Right on crime? Conservative party politics and mano dura policies in El Salvador. Latin American Research Review 48 (1):44–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howitt, D (1998) Crime, the Media, and the Law. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Huguet, C and Szabó de Carvalho, I (2008) Violence in the Brazilian favelas and the role of the police. New Directions for Youth Development 2008 (119):93–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Imai, K, Keele, L and Tingley, D (2010) A general approach to causal mediation analysis. Psychological Methods 15 (4):309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Imai, K et al. (2011) Unpacking the black box of causality: learning about causal mechanisms from experimental and observational studies. American Political Science Review 105 (4):765–789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imbens, GW (2010) Better late than nothing. Journal of Economic Literature 48, 399–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, JT (2006) The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist 61 (7):651–670.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keele, L (2015) The statistics of causal inference: a view from political methodology. Political Analysis 23 (3):313–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinder, DR (1998) Communication and opinion. Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1):167–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krause, K (2014) Supporting the iron fist: crime news, public opinion, and authoritarian crime control in Guatemala. Latin American Politics and Society 56 (1):98–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kronick, D (2014) Crime and electoral punishment. Working paper, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Ley, S (2017) To vote or not to vote: how criminal violence shapes electoral participation. Journal of Conflict Resolution. doi: 10.1177/0022002717708600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liebertz, SS (2015) Crime, elites, and democratic support in Latin America. PhD thesis, Florida State University.Google Scholar
Lin, W (2013) Agnostic notes on regression adjustments to experimental data: reexamining freedman’s critique. The Annals of Applied Statistics 7 (1):295–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupu, N and Pontusson, J (2011) The structure of inequality and the politics of redistribution. American Political Science Review 105 (2):316–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magaloni, B, Franco, E and Melo, V (2015) Killing in the slums: an impact evaluation of police reform in Rio de Janeiro. Working Paper No. 556, Stanford Center for Internal Development.Google Scholar
Malone, MFT (2010) Does Dirty Harry have the answer? Citizen support for the rule of law in Central America. Public Integrity 13 (1):59–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, J (2015) Political information cycles: when do voters sanction incumbent parties for high homicide rates? Columbia University (unpublished manuscript).Google Scholar
Mayer, N and Tiberj, V (2004) Do issues matter? Law and order in the 2002 French presidential election. In Lewis-BeckMS, (ed.) The French Voter: Before and After the 2002 Elections. Berlin: Springer, pp. 33–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCombs, ME and Shaw, DL (1972) The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (2):176–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merolla, JL, Mezini, E and Zechmeister, EJ (2013) Crime, economic crisis, and support for democracy in Mexico. Politica y Gobierno 221–251.Google Scholar
Moncada, E (2016) Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, SL and Winship, C (2014) Counterfactuals and Causal Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perez, O (2015) The impact of crime on voter choice in Latin America. In Carlin RE, Singer M and Zechmeister E, (eds) Latin American Voter. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Pérez, OJ (2003) Democratic legitimacy and public insecurity: crime and democracy in El Salvador and Guatemala. Political Science Quarterly 118 (4):627–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pimentel, SD et al. (2015) Large, sparse optimal matching with refined covariate balance in an observational study of the health outcomes produced by new surgeons. Journal of the American Statistical Association 110 (510):515–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rapoza, K (2016) Brazil is murder capital of the world, but Rio is safer than Compton, Detroit, St. Louis... Forbes, 29 January.Google Scholar
Resa, M and Zubizarreta, JR (2016) Evaluation of subset matching methods and forms of covariate balance. Statistics in Medicine 35 (27):4961–4979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ríos, V (2015) How government coordination controlled organized crime: the case of Mexico’s cocaine markets. Journal of Conflict Resolution 59 (8):1433–1454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR (1984) The consequences of adjustment for a concomitant variable that has been affected by the treatment. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) 656–666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR (2004) Design sensitivity in observational studies. Biometrika 91 (1):153–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR (2005) Heterogeneity and causality: unit heterogeneity and design sensitivity in observational studies. The American Statistician 59 (2):147–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR (2010) Design of Observational Studies. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenbaum, PR (2011) What aspects of the design of an observational study affect its sensitivity to bias from covariates that were not observed? In Dorans NJ and Sinharay S (eds), Looking Back: Proceedings of a Conference in Honor of Paul W. Holland. Berlin: Springer, pp. 87–114.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR (2015) How to see more in observational studies: some new quasi-experimental devices. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 2, 21–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR, Ross, RN and Silber, JH (2007) Minimum distance matched sampling with fine balance in an observational study of treatment for ovarian cancer. Journal of the American Statistical Association 102 (477):75–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbaum, PR and Silber, JH (2009) Amplification of sensitivity analysis in matched observational studies. Journal of the American Statistical Association 104 (488):1398–1405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubin, DB (2008) For objective causal inference, design trumps analysis. The Annals of Applied Statistics 2 (3):808–840.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sekhon, JS (2009) Opiates for the matches: matching methods for causal inference. Annual Review of Political Science 12, 487–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seligson, AL (2002) When democracies elect dictators: motivations for and impact of the election of former authoritarians in Argentina and Bolivia. PhD thesis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar
Seligson, M and Azpuru, D (2000) Las dimensiones y el impacto político de la delincuencia en Guatemala [The dimensions and the political impact of delinquency in Guatemala]. L. Rosero, Poblaciones del Istmo.Google Scholar
Seligson, MA (2003) Public support for due process rights: the case of Guatemala. Journal of the Southwest 45 (4):557–594.Google Scholar
Shapiro, RY (2009) From depression to depression? Seventy-five years of public opinion toward welfare. Annual Fall Research Conference of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, Washington, DC, November.Google Scholar
Stuart, EA (2010) Matching methods for causal inference: a review and a look forward. Statistical Science: A Review Journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics 25 (1):1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trelles, A and Carreras, M (2012) Bullets and votes: violence and electoral participation in Mexico. Journal of Politics in Latin America 4 (2):89–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
UNODC (2013) Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends, Contexts, Data, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.Google Scholar
Visconti, G (2018) Replication data for: Policy Preferences after Crime Victimization: Panel and Survey Evidence from Latin America. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IUG9LC, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:9RHcI/PMUXujjK8hsmkjlw==.Google Scholar
Visconti, G and Zubizarreta, J (2018) Handling limited overlap in observational studies with cardinality matching. Observational Studies (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Winter, B (2016) Brazil’s authoritarian side makes a comeback. Americas Quarterly. Available at http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/brazils-authoritarian-side-makes-comeback.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, J and Kilcioglu, C (2016) Designmatch: Construction of optimally matched samples for randomized experiments and observational studies that are balanced by design. The Comprehensive R Archive Network, Version 0.2.0.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, J (2012) Using mixed integer programming for matching in an observational study of kidney failure after surgery. Journal of the American Statistical Association 107 (500):1360–1371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Visconti Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IUG9LC
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Visconti supplementary material

Appendix

Download Visconti supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 144.2 KB