Mind the Gap: Institutional Capacity, Globalization, and the Discrepancy Between Criminal Justice and Health Homicide Data

In this research, we treat the “homicide gap”—discrepancies in homicides recorded as deaths by public health systems and as crimes by criminal justice systems—as an outcome to be explained. Drawing on new institutionalism theory, we argue that the level of discrepancy between homicide data from the two sources reflects the capacity of domestic institutions and the extent to which countries are embedded in globalized systems of norms and governance. Based on homicide counts from the UNODC and the WHO across 99 countries from 1991 to 2020, our Bayesian quantile regression analysis shows that countries with stronger political system capacity, more robust health systems, and greater globalization exhibit significantly smaller homicide gaps. We also find that the effect of globalization is largest in countries whose strong local institutions enable them to better actualize the benefits associated with global integration. We discuss implications for theory, method and policy.