Income inequality and fear of crime across the European region
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370816648993 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370816648993
European Journal of Criminology
2017, Vol. 14(2) 221 –241
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370816648993
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Income inequality and fear
of crime across the
European region
Christin-Melanie Vauclair
Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal
Boyka Bratanova
University of St Andrews, UK
Abstract
This paper aims to take a holistic approach to studying fear of crime by testing predictors at
multiple levels of analyses. Data from the European Social Survey (N = 56,752 from 29 countries)
were used to test and extend the Income Inequality and Sense of Vulnerability Hypotheses.
The findings confirm that (1) individuals in societies with greater income inequalities are more
fearful of crime, and (2) older or disabled people as well as women report greater fear of crime.
Contrary to the hypotheses, ethnic majority and not ethnic minority members report greater fear
of crime, if they reside in high income inequality countries. It is further demonstrated that fear
of crime explains the inverse association between income inequality and subjective well-being in
this particular subsample.
Keywords
Cross-national comparisons, European Social Survey, fear of crime, income inequality, multilevel
analyses, subjective well-being
Feeling safe can be seen as a basic human need (Maslow, 1970) that needs to be fulfilled
to allow individuals to realize their full potential (Marmot, 2004). Not surprisingly, fear
of crime research has become a central area of criminological investigation, as well as
a key focus of crime policy throughout the world (Brunton-Smith and Sturgis, 2011).
Despite its international relevance and the descriptive empirical evidence that average
levels of fear of crime vary across countries (for example, Blinkert, 2010; Ceobanu,
2010; Hummelsheim et al., 2011; Semyonov et al., 2012), there is surprisingly little
Corresponding author:
Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Edifício ISCTE, CIS-IUL, Avenidas
das Forças Armadas, Lisboa, 1649-026, Portugal.
Email: melanie.vauclair@iscte.pt
648993EUC0010.1177/1477370816648993European Journal of CriminologyVauclair and Bratanova
research-article2016
Article
222 European Journal of Criminology 14(2)
empirical research that aims to explain why people feel more fearful in some countries
than in others.
To date, research has mainly focused on examining factors that may be associated
with fear of crime in a piecemeal fashion. These studies can be distinguished in regard to
the different levels of analyses that they address. Within the scope of individual-level
studies, the focus has been on examining individual-level predictors and consequences
of people’s fear of crime. Much research has been devoted to the vulnerability hypothe-
sis, which stipulates that socio-demographic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, and
physical disability are predictors of fear of crime since people who belong to these social
groups feel physically or socially vulnerable (Rader et al., 2012) and, therefore, at a
higher risk of victimization (see, for example, Pain, 2000). Others have emphasized the
role of (direct and indirect) victimization experience as an important factor in developing
fear of crime (see, for example, Lane et al., 2014).
Fear of crime has wide-reaching consequences in regard to physical, psychological,
behavioural, and social effects (see Lane et al., 2014). It is detrimental to people’s phys-
ical health and mental well-being and influences people’s behaviour, for example by
engaging in crime prevention strategies such as locking doors and not walking alone at
night. Although this may temporarily enhance a sense of security, it can also lead to
social withdrawal and disengagement from activities in the community that are impor-
tantly related to subjective well-being. Given that fear of crime is primarily a psychologi-
cal phenomenon, its consequences should be most prominent at the psychological level.
A great deal of individual-level research has indeed corroborated that fear of crime is
detrimental to people’s subjective well-being (for example, Cohen, 2008; Hanslmaier,
2013; Lane et al., 2014; Michalos and Zumbo, 2000; Moore, 2006).
In contrast to this individual-level research, the more sociological tradition has
focused on the wider social context in which individuals reside in order to explain their
fear of crime (Brunton-Smith and Sturgis, 2011). Most of this research has used data
from the United States (see Lane et al., 2014) and examined the effect of context on fear
of crime at the meso-level in the form of neighbourhood or local community character-
istics. Although these studies have advanced our understanding of how context factors
can explain variations in fear of crime, many of them are conditioned by the US context
and do not provide any insights into macro-level variations in fear of crime. The few
studies that have examined fear of crime across macro-level units, such as nations, have
focused on examining either antecedents or consequences of fear of crime and mostly in
a rather atheoretical fashion (for example, Blinkert, 2010; Ceobanu, 2010; Hummelsheim
et al., 2011; Semyonov et al., 2012; Vieno et al., 2013). Although these studies usually
analysed predictors at both the individual and country level, they did not examine more
theory-guided multilevel models with mediating variables or how country-level factors
may moderate individual-level associations (so-called cross-level interactions).
In this paper, we aimed to test an influential theory in the social science literature that
stipulates that income inequality yields a number of psychological issues, including a
greater fear of crime and worse subjective well-being. We tested this hypothesis by adopt-
ing a holistic perspective, that is, by examining both antecedents and consequences of fear
of crime taking into account who is most vulnerable to this issue. In order to achieve this
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