ABSTRACT
There are considerable risks in adopting an official homicide rate for one year as an estimate of true homicide rate. To enhance the reliability of the present data, homicide rates were averaged over a 20-year period from 955 to 1974 inclusive. Correlations between a number of readily available indices of income inequality and homicide were calculated. Homicide rate is a positively accelerated function of income inequality. While a curvilinear regression might have explained somewhat more variance, it was decided to opt for the simplicity of a linear model. The legislative strength of social democratic parties data was also not as compelling as that for income inequality because it was based on only 20 countries, and because, even though as much as 6.1 percent. of the variance in a step-wise procedure could be explained by the legislative strength of social democrats, this was after only 33.3 percent of the variance had been partialled out by the control variables.
