Beyond sticks and stones: Human capital enhancement efforts in response to violent crime in Latin America

Journal article

Rivera, Mauricio & Bárbara Zárate-Tenório (2016) Beyond sticks and stones: Human capital enhancement efforts in response to violent crime in Latin America, European Journal of Political Research 55 (3): 531–548.

Download Final publication
.pdf

This is the Version of Record of the publication, available here in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. This publication may be subject to copyright: please visit the publisher’s website for details. All rights reserved.

Read the article here

Violent crime has been commonplace in Latin America over the past decades. While existing research has made progress in explaining the rationale and outcomes of government coercive strategies against crime, it has overlooked the non‐coercive strategies implemented to improve public security. It is argued in this article that political authorities make human capital enhancement efforts to shape actors’ incentives about criminal activity and mitigate crime. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that violent crime increases human capital enhancement efforts, and that the effect of violent crime on human capital enhancement efforts is larger when left‐oriented governments are in power because they stress actors’ motivations over windows of opportunities as the main drivers of crime. Support for these hypotheses is found in a sample of Latin American democracies in the period 1990–2007.

An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. Reload 🗙