Graduation Year
2022
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Political Studies
Second Department
Political Economy
Reader 1
Melissa Rogers
Reader 2
William Barndt
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2022 Diego Flores
Abstract
The violence characterizing the Mexican drug war necessitates studies that seek to understand the causal mechanisms at play in prompting this violence. Given that ongoing violence, is inherently a multicausal phenomenon, this study seeks to understand the role that marginalization plays in the increase of violence, specifically homicide rates in 2010 at the municipality level. The relationship between the independent variable, marginalization indexes of all Mexican municipalities, is run in multiple least squares regression with the dependent variables homicide rates per 100,00 also at the municipality level. I hypothesize that an increase in the marginalization index will lead to an increase in homicide rates at the municipal level; municipalities with higher levels of marginalization will have higher levels of homicides and vice versa. My findings result in statistical significance with the novel model and statistical insignificance in the multiple regressions that include control variables. The relationship between the two variables is inversely correlated, suggesting that municipalities with lower levels of marginalization can, to an extent, predict higher homicide rates. That is, many socially and economically “better off” municipalities are bearing the brunt of violence from the drug war. Lastly, through quantitative analyses, this study reaffirms the characteristics of municipalities facing the brunt of violence: they tend to be relatively well off to moderately well off, rural municipalities nestled in between much larger cities. These results suggest the need for different approaches in understanding the multi-causal phenomenon of violence related to the drug war, such as smaller units of analyses that look at this relationship at the locality or even neighborhood level.
Recommended Citation
Flores, Diego, "How Can Economic and Social Marginalization Explain Mexico’s Drug War Violence? An Assessment of the Role that Poverty and Social Marginalization Plays in Explaining Variations in Homicide Rates." (2022). Pitzer Senior Theses. 185.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/185
