Islam, modernization and crime: A test of the religious ecology thesis

A Double‐Edged Sword: The Countervailing Effects of Religion on Cross‐National Violent Crime

“…We include the total population growth rate from 2000 to 2005 as a control variable (U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects), which past research predicts will increase violent crime through disrupting societal norms or facilitating inequality (Lee, ; Nivette, ; Nivette and Eisner, ). Since the religious denomination of a country may affect violent crime rates and account for variation in religious intensity and belief (Groves, McCleary, and Newman, ; Groves, Newman, and Corrado, ; Helal and Coston, ; Neapolitan, ), we also control for whether the largest religion in a country is Catholic (1 = Catholic; 0 = otherwise) or another Christian tradition (1 = Protestant, Orthodox, or “unspecified” Christian; 0 = otherwise) (2005 CIA World Factbook). The referent category combines Muslim countries with other religion countries (Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Animism, and Shintoism) as there are no statistically significant differences between them in models predicting the dependent variables (results not shown).…”

“…When religion is the theoretical and empirical focus of a study, it is common to operationalize religion merely as majority religion dummy variables (or the percentage of a particular religion in a country), which cannot distinguish between varying levels of religious intensity or explain variation in crime rates for countries of the same religious type (see Groves, McCleary, and Newman, ; Groves, Newman, and Corrado, ; Helal and Coston, ; Neapolitan, ). These general religion measures produce mixed results, with studies finding negative, positive, and null effects for religion on violent crime rates (Groves, McCleary, and Newman, ; Groves, Newman, and Corrado, ; Neapolitan, ).…”

Does Religion Suppress, Socialize, Soothe, or Support? Exploring Religiosity's Influence on Crime

“…There seems to be even less exploration of the effects of personal religiosity on criminality in Islamic countries, despite the fact that adherence to Islam is often assumed to be related to the lower crime rates found in those societies (Neapolitan ; Serajzadeh ; but see Groves, Newman, and Corrado ). A few studies report significant negative effects of religiosity on maladjustment or minor deviance in samples of Indonesian youth (e.g., French et al ; Sallquist and Eisenberg ) or adolescents in one predominantly Muslim area of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Klanjšek, Vazsonyi, and Trejos‐Castillo, ).…”

What We Spend and What We Get: Public and Private Provision of Crime Prevention

“…Only in Islamic law do we find a mixture of religious and governmental restrictions against the core crimes. Islamic law tends to encourage non-governmental response to the core crimes, including murder (Groves, Newman and Corrado, 1987). Standardization and codification of criminal laws lowered the transaction costs required for both inter-personal interaction and property transfers.…”