Temperature, Cultural Masculinity, and Domestic Political Violence

Cross-national data sets were used to examine the association between ambient temperature and internal political violence in 136 countries between 1948 and 1977. Political riots and armed attacks occur more frequently in warm countries than in both cold and hot countries, after controlling for effects of population size and density and levels of socioeconomic development and democracy. National differences on the cultural masculinity dimension, however, do account for this curvilinear temperature-violence association, in a subsample of 53 countries, suggesting that culture mediates the association. An explanation for this mediation in terms of Paternal Investment Theory is proposed.