[Statistical and dynamic analysis of crime in relation to primary dimensions in various countries]

The examination of the effects of social change on crime has experienced a revival of interest in the past decade. With the increasing availability of cross-national data such analyses are being done in a comparative perspective. The current effort is designed to examine the relationship between three variables which have been shown to be empirically and theoretically pertinent to the study of social change and crime indices. Specifically, the variables of population, gross national product per capita and political orientation are regressed on the homicide rates, property crime rates and total crime rates for a number of countries. This analysis is done statically for 1965 and dynamically, for the change in the variables from 1960 to 1965. The data for the independent variables were acquired from the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, Second Edition. The source of the dependent variables was the International Crime Statistics published by the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol). The problems with such data are recongized and discussed. The results indicate that in the static analysis the three variables explain a substantial amount of the variance in property crime rates and total crime rates whereas they do not explain much of the variance in the homicide rate. Gross national product per capita contributes the most to the explained variance in all the analyses. A theoretical perspective combining the ideas incorporated in control theory and in environmental opportunity theory was employed to account for the results. The results of the dynamic analyses parallel those of the static analyses, with the exception of the equation employing the total crime rate at the dependent variable. The total variance explained in this equation was significantly lower than in the static analysis for the total crime rate. Durkheim's notions of the functions of crime and the expected stability in crime rates were offered as an explanation for this finding.