Crime and equality, or crime and punishment?

Despite its significance as a social, economic and—as I argue below—fundamentally political phenomenon, crime remains a largely overlooked topic in political economy. This dissertation argues that this represents an unfortunate omission. Over the pages that follow, I analyse the political implications of crime and fear of crime for the politics of inequality and redistribution. Modelling fear of crime as a negative externality of inequality, I argue that its consequences depend on who the criminals are: building on work in social psychology, I find that the identity of those who are perceived as likely perpetrators of crime significantly affects how criminal behaviour is interpreted. This comes with important implications for views about how crime as a social problem can (and should) be solved. Using a combination of observational data from Western Europe and the US, together with the results from a laboratory experiment conducted in Oxford, I first demonstrate that there exists a robust and systematic positive relationship between the local level of income inequality and fear of crime. In a second step, I show that shared group membership—manifested empirically as low population heterogeneity—facilitates situational explanations of crime, including poverty, while divergent identities promote dispositional attributions unrelated to inequality. As a result, while fear of crime in homogenous contexts is associated with a significant increase in demand for redistribution, particularly among high-income voters, I find no parallel effect in settings that are more diverse. The opposite relationship holds true for support for harsher punishment and law enforcement spending: whereas fear of crime increases support for such policies in settings that are sufficiently heterogenous, the same does not hold true when the level of population heterogeneity is lower. This finding both challenges previous accounts of the relationship between inequality, fear of crime and support for redistribution, and helps to explain cross-national differences in criminal justice policy.