Determinants of Crime for Swiss Cantons with Particular Reference to Direct Legislation
نویسنده
چکیده
Switzerland is a three-tier federal state in which the single states, the cantons, enjoy great fiscal and political independence of the federal government. Furthermore, they differ considerably in sociodemographic structure, economic performance and political institutions. This makes this country a perfect laboratory for analyzing the causal relationship between potential economic determinants of crime and offences against persons, property and sex crimes, avoiding the problems usually faced in international comparisons. For the first time, we also include an institutional determinant to capture the impact of direct legislative voting rights of the people on crime. Based on previous, primarily economic, but also sociological research it is hypothesized that no crime enhancing impact of direct democracy should be observed. Our estimation results seem to support this conjecture. For a consistent assessment, we also analyze the impact of direct democratic institutions on various components of public expenditure for security. Our findings are based on the estimation of a structural model of crime in its reduced form, using a pooled cross section of cantonal crime rates (1986 1998). Version: 8 of June, 2004
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