Maydom, Barry and López García, A.I. and Berens, S. (2024) Economic informality and security policy preferences in Mexico and Latin America. In: Starke, P. and Elbek, L.L. and Wenzelburger, G. (eds.) Unequal Security: Welfare, Crime and Social Inequality. Routledge, pp. 141-164. ISBN 9781032611259.
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Abstract
One of the fundamental tasks of a state is to protect its citizens from violence. When states fail to do so, or do so unequally, they undermine the social contract by which citizens consent to be governed by and pay taxes to the state in exchange for security and public services. In many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the social contract is under pressure not only from high and rising levels of violent crime, but also from widespread economic informality. In this chapter, we argue that fragile social contracts in LAC have important implications for citizens’ preferences about security policies and governments’ ability to bring violent crime under control. Previous research has found that crime victimisation – a failure of the state to keep a citizen safe – is associated with greater support for punitive security policies (García-Ponce et al 2023; Visconti 2020). Although levels of crime vary significantly across the LAC, iron fist or mano dura approaches to crime fighting have become popular throughout the region, even in countries with low levels of crime such as Chile and Argentina (Rosen and Cutrona 2023). These security policies are often counter-productive, lead to more frequent human rights abuses and serve to further reduce state capacity (Flores-Macias 2018). We argue that economic informality can help to explain continued support for – or at least lack of opposition to - these approaches.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Economic informality, public opinion, security policies, Latin America, Mexico, survey experiment |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Barry Maydom |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Dec 2024 16:03 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Dec 2024 17:21 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54136 |
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