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Public Opinion On The Death Penalty

Research on public support for the death penalty has neglected comparative analysis. It is not clear whether the results of past research based disproportionately on the United States will replicate in other nations with varied institutional and cultural frameworks. The present article has two central aims: (a) to replicate U.S.-based findings, based on the theoretical perspectives of instrumentalism (crime-centeredness) and broader, non-crime-centered symbolic orientations, for a set of 17 nations, and (b) to partially test the elite leadership hypothesis. The latter refers to the notion that legal abolition of the death penalty will substantially delegitimate capital punishment in a nation's cultural system and will lead to a steady decline in death penalty support. Individual-level data are from the International Social Science Program and refer to 17,725 respondents in 17 nations. A multiple logistic regression analysis largely confirmed U.S.-based research. In particular, indicators from an instrumental approach that were found to be significant included individuals' degree of punitiveness and nations' homicide rates. Measures of symbolic orientations that were found to be significant predictors of death penalty support included authoritarianism and fundamentalism. Some support was found for the elite leadership hypothesis. Residents of abolitionist nations, especially if they resided in nations with a long history of abolition, were significantly less supportive of the death penalty than residents of retentionist nations. The full model explained 25 percent of the variance in support for capital punishment, providing systematic cross-national evidence for U.S.-based theories of death penalty support.