Unemployment and Right-Wing Extremist Crime
Zweimüller, Josef and
Armin Falk
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Josef Zweimüller
No 4997, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
Right-wing extremism is a serious problem in many societies. A prominent hypothesis states that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right-wing extremist crime. In this paper we empirically test this hypothesis. We use a previously unused dataset that includes all officially recorded right-wing criminal acts in Germany. These data are recorded by the German Federal Criminal Police Office on a monthly state-level basis. Our main finding is that there is in fact a significant positive relation between unemployment and right-wing criminal activities. We show further that the big difference in right-wing crime between East and West German states can mostly be attributed to differences in unemployment. This finding reinforces the importance of unemployment as an explanatory factor for right-wing crime and questions explanations based solely on the different socialization in former communist East Germany and the liberal West German states. Our data further allow us to separate violent from non-violent right-wing crimes. We show that unemployment is closely related to both types of crimes, but that the association with non-violent crimes is much stronger. Since right-wing crime is committed particularly by relatively young males, we also explore whether the youth unemployment rate is a better predictor for right-wing crime than total unemployment. This hypothesis can be rejected: given total unemployment, a higher share of youth unemployment does not affect right-wing extremist crime rates.
Keywords: Hate crime; Right-wing extremism; Unemployment; Cost of unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4997 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment and Right‐wing Extremist Crime (2011) 
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-wing Extremist Crime (2009) 
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-wing Extremist Crime (2009) 
Working Paper: Unemployment and Right-Wing Extremist Crime (2005) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:4997
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP4997
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().