Functional Disintegration of Institutions (FDI) and Crime in Iran

The number of crimes increased tremendously during the early 1990s in Iran. One approach maintains that the roots of this phenomenon can be found in the negative impacts of the First and Second Economic Development Plans, which include poverty, unemployment and inequality. This hypothesis will be tested empirically. The second hypothesis is: the reason was Functional Disintegration of Institutions (FDI) between economic, political, social and cultural institutions. This hypothesis will be tested within the framework of Emile Durkheim’s theory of division of labor during the time of rapid economic reforms as well as within the framework of the theory of unbalanced and rapid development. Besides the said period, the two hypotheses have been tested for all the years between 1984  to 2008. The variable FDI is not merely a theoretical one, but its empirical measurement indicator has been defined for the present study. Segmented regression analysis of interrupted time series has been employed to test the hypotheses.