Social capital and homicide

Despite recent theoretical attention to "social capital" and its impact on a range of public problems, including crime, few studies have evaluated the relationship between crime rates and levels of social capital across popul ations. That research gap is due, in part, to the absence of macro-level em pirical indicators of social capital. In this article, we measure social ca pital as a latent construct with aggregated voting and organizational membe rship data, and survey data on social trust, and examine its relationship w ith homicide rates for a nationally representative sample of geographic are as. Structural equation models show that the construct of social capital ha s a significant direct effect on homicide rates, net of other structural co variates, and controlling for the reciprocal influence of homicide on socia l capital. Although social capital mediates little of the effect on homicid e of levels of economic deprivation, it explains more than two-thirds of th e effect of Southern regional location. The results indicate that depleted social capital contributes to high levels of homicide, and provide a promis ing basis for future research on the mechanisms linking social capital to c rime at the macro level.