There is a loose correlation across states that are typically red and states that are typically blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate
I can speak about the mountains of North Carolina and the surrounding areas. My stomping grounds were between two tiny towns, Andrews and Murphy. Look it up on a map if you would like. It’s probably similar but also extremely different to other places. This is my experience alone but it may give context to any other comments.
Let’s talk about politics first.
From my perspective, and where I grew up, poorer and fairly isolated populations tend to be a little less educated and extremely religious. They are vulnerable to manipulation by religion and politics because both are heavily connected. It’s a cycle that is taught and passed down through families, to be honest.
Politics that focus on blaming others for their misfortunes seems to work really well. It’s super easy to blame issues on people and cultures they have never met since all they know is what they have been told.
Education plays a role, but not a huge one. Teachers of the local schools likely grew up in the same area. Heavily biased discussions of religion and politics in schools is fairly normal as well. (One of my science teachers constantly reminded us that evolution was evil, but he had to at least mention it by law.)
Crime is an interesting thing. Drug and alcohol abuse may be rampant in smaller communities. It’s just that there is nothing better to do than get fucked up and breed. With drug addiction comes crime. It’s worse because jobs are already limited and many people are at or below poverty to begin with. At least in my old town, murders we uncommon but cases of domestic abuse, robbery and other crimes were astronomical. When crystal meth showed up on the scene in the late 90’s, it was like adding gasoline to a fire that was nearly out of control to start with. A good number of my highschool classmates either didn’t survive or are probably still in jail.
Edit: I was a fairly extreme alcoholic for a number of years and started drinking very early in my life. I quit that shit though and I absolutely blame it on how I grew up.
There is a commonality between most of the people as most of them don’t want to leave where they grew up. Sure, many of them do go out in the world for a bit, but most of them just go right back home.
People who leave that life tend to be more educated, maybe have a little more money and will generally completely reject anything from their past, especially religion and politics. (Oh. That last bit was easy to describe because its me and a very tiny circle of people I grew up with. We are spread across the country though, so we really don’t talk much anymore.)
It’s weird though. Through all the bullshit, I still kinda miss the place. There is nothing in the world quite like being miles away from society and in the middle of the woods. Where I grew up was an extremely beautiful place, society excluded.
So. I intended that to be a neutral analysis, but it probably never could’ve been. Hopefully, it gave you a partial answer to your question.
Edit 2: Sorry about the wall-o-text. I could probably write a book about this stuff since I hardly scratched the surface of your question. There are many layers to this, from an insiders view anyway.
That makes a lot of sense
Your question is a bit like asking if ice cream sales are linked to murder rates. It’s true that there is a link, but only because there are other things going on that affect both. There is no causation between the two. In other words, being conservative doesn’t automatically mean you do more crimes, and doing crimes doesn’t make you more conservative. There is a lingering variable here, which is poverty and income inequality. The parts of the US with the most poverty are linked with high crime rates because people do crimes when they are desperate. And people living in poverty are often poorly educated and can be susceptible to the appeal of conservative dogma, which is often about laying blame for poor economic outcomes, even if it’s mislaid.
My answer is only with regards to the US and I am not speaking to other places. In many countries there is an actual left-wing party which offers an appealing alternative for the working class. In the US, your options are the Republicans, who acknowledge you are poor and tell you it’s because of things like government overreach and minorities, or the Democrats, who will just pretend you don’t exist if you are poor unless you are also a minority.
You sidestep the fact that most conservative areas are poor and less educated because of decades of conservative policies. So, not exactly a correlation.
I could agree with that. Even though I wrote quite a bit about my own experiences in this post, I still had to add some subtle caveats that were intended to imply things that you said as well.
Rural areas can have wildly different cultures even if they are just a few miles apart. Some can lean left and some can lean right. It does tend to lean more right the further south of the Mason-Dixon line you get, though. There is a correlation to poverty tucked in there as well.
While it’s true to say that there is typically more crime in southern states that are mostly right leaning, it’s a misleading statement and not completely accurate when you look at all states.
Rural areas have a higher violent crime rate per capita than urban areas, but that’s not quite the same thing.
Yeah, it’s funny when people from rural areas hop onto social media and start sharing their talking points about crimes in left-leaning cities…and then someone explains “per capita” to them.
Some urban areas will still have higher per capita rates than some rural areas, but it’s funny when people try to share raw numbers of crimes as if population didn’t matter.
Statistics suck. It’s not because they might be inaccurate, it’s because they are so easy to misinterpret. “Per capita” is wildly misunderstood or ignored. It’s all about presentation, IMHO.
Number-fuck example:
- Only 5% of the US population is _____ so it’s irrelevant.
- There are 16.7 million people in the US that are _____ and presents a massive problem.
Same numbers, different context.
What helps in reducing crime is social services that treat people as human beings. What doesn’t help is criminalising poverty or addiction. Which is exactly what the “conservative” states in the US are doing.
In terms of US states, yes. Mostly due to the overlap with impoverished areas.
Who could have ever foreseen that letting literally brain damaged people be in charge of other people might not end well? 🙄
There is a bit more to that study if you read into it better. Studies that are well done attempt to exclude personal bias which doesn’t make for an exciting read. While I sarcastically agree with the hypothesis, it’s not the result of the paper. (Some correlation may still be measurable and presented, but that doesn’t make the hypothesis statistically significant.)
However, to our knowledge, no lesion work has yet directly examined the link between dlPFC damage and political ideology.
Specifically, we examined ideological extremity on general, social, and economic dimensions both as the absolute distance from the ideology scale midpoint and separately for those on the left versus right on the ideology scale. However, we failed to observe any statistically significant associations between lesion type and any of the indicators of ideological extremity, …
We all need to be careful when presenting studies. I didn’t even do a proper level of diligence with this one, TBH. Studies need to be repeated by independent teams, sources need to be verified and sample sizes need to be taken into account. It takes time consuming work to accurately use a study in a discussion.
That’s not the only one that’s been done though.
I think it’s too broad a question. How is conservative measured? State level? District? Past voting? Voter rolls?
I also imagine the type and level of crime matter. But there’s also what isn’t recorded.
Interesting question, though
I’m sorry about that. I’ll try to make a question like that more specific next time.
Don’t be sorry :) I’m sure different people would even argue about the definitions above. I lived in a super-left (comparatively and using US terms) neighborhood in a generally left city, in a generally left district in a state that mostly voted conservative. Depending upon the granularity (and definition of all the above terms), the results would play out rather differently. I’m a software engineer for a living so exercises a bit like this are something I do often
There’s some really good reporting on this specific to California:
https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/homicide-and-gun-murder-rates
Takeaway: in the last 20 years, conservative areas have seen increased gun violence and murders and now lead the state.
when you normalize for population sizes, absolutely. this map from 2020 makes it pretty clear, yeah?
here’s the wikipedia page I ripped it from. it should provide a bit more explanation,I don’t think it does at this high level. Rural states still have high population centers of varying political and socioeconomic statuses. Tennessee and others have a crime problem along the Mississippi River iirc. There is just so much context lost in a state level generalization.
Those are my thoughts as well. The data on the chart starts to get “broken” between states like North Carolina and Tennessee, for example. The chart would be a bit more clear if the numbers were shown at the country level and not just by state.
It does, when you correct it by population- that is to say “crime rate per 100k”.
Large population centers will have more crime simply for having more people (and therefore increased opportunity)
The data shows a clear indication that more conservative policies lead to more crime. It would be extremely difficult to parse that into per city. (And you would be right in that this data should only be taken broadly.)
Partly because a state level law simply has more force and influence than city-level ordinances- how extensive and even what a city can enforce generally depends on the state; further its difficult to imagine that a violent crime wouldn’t be covered in state law- meaning it’s the state policy that has the most effect. (For example, sentencing guidelines,)
Also, studies have found that- as far as elections impacting people’s lives goes- that the race with the greatest impact is actually the state AG. Because they set policy for what crimes take priority in prosecuting, and what sentencing they should be asking for, etc.
I would consider re-framing a question like this to address what we even consider “crime”. we usually don’t factor in corporate crime and wage theft, both of which are incredibly damaging. or the crimes waged against the poor and the climate, which are harming all of us.
