Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

Abstract

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim’s work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.