Legacies of Crime in the Wake of Revolution

• In Event: Protests and Violence in Democracies & Autocracies

Abstract

Criminal violence is the leading cause of conflict deaths in the world, yet political scientists have paid less attention to it than to other forms of conflict such as civil wars. Past research suggests a link between revolution and crime but does not adequately explain why some post-revolutionary societies experience more crime than others. We propose several explanations. First, we hypothesize that urban civic revolutions will generate more crime than rural social revolutions because a) they disrupt law and order in cities where crime is already concentrated; b) they provide more opportunities for criminals to participate in revolution and thereby gain legitimacy; and c) they produce fragmented governments with a low capacity to contain crime. Second, we hypothesize that crime will increase more when revolutions spur democratic transition than when they do not. Democratization reduces the state’s incentives for political monitoring, renders police reform electorally risky, and liberalizes markets in ways that can fuel crime. Third, we hypothesize that the combination of an urban civic revolution and democratic transition is especially crime-inducing because the ad-hoc coalitions that typically mount urban civic revolutions subsequently become post-revolutionary electorates with incoherent preferences for police reform. We test our hypotheses on an original dataset of post-revolutionary crime using nested case analysis, a mixed quantitative/qualitative approach ideally suited to both cross-national comparison and the careful examination of specific revolutionary episodes. Our study helps to show why so many recent democratic revolutions have ended in disenchantment.

Authors

• Lisa Mueller, Macalester College

• Eric Seth Mosinger, Santa Clara University