From Clocks and Clouds VOL. 3 NO. 1
The Populist Bind: Death Penalty Abolition as an Anti-Democratic Decision
IN THIS ARTICLE
The continued application of the death penalty in the United States marks the country as an extreme outlier among its allies and like-minded nations in the 21st century. In order to explain America's retention of this criminal punishment, scholars have sought to first explore: what explains variation in a Western democracy's retention or abolition of the death penalty? In an attempt to eliminate intervening variables present in past studies, this paper provides a comparative historical analysis of death penalty abolition movements in Great Britain and the United States. While many scholars have asserted that cultural dispositions explain the survival of capital punishment in the United States, this analysis ultimately supports the contentious hypothesis that the U.S. has not abolished the death penalty because the nation is more democratic in structure and practice than Great Britain.
As three countries abolish the death penalty every year, over two-thirds of the world has now abandoned execution as an acceptable punishment for crime today (Amnesty International 2012). Beginning with the repeal of the death penalty in Western European nations during the 1960s, a sweeping international trend towards abolition has pressured even Rwanda, a nation still prosecuting genocide-related atrocities, to reject execution as a means of establishing justice in 2007. Despite this emerging global norm, the United States is consistently ranked among the top six nations with the most confirmed executions, led only by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq (DPIC "An International Perspective" 2013). Since the retentionist countries are almost exclusively developing or undemocratic nations, capital punishment as a policy places the United States in a distinctly unfamiliar category, removed from its allies and like-minded nations in the 21st century. This policy divergence was recently highlighted when the United States declined to vote alongside a record number of countries in the United Nations General Assembly for a worldwide moratorium on executions in November 2012 (DPIC "UN Death Penalty Resolution" 2013).
It has been suggested that the United States and European nations “are now farther divided on the question of capital punishment than on any other morally significant question of government policy" (Zimring 2003, 181). While the United States saw the abolition of the death penalty recently in Connecticut in 2012 and Maryland in 2013, thirty-two American states still retain execution as a punishment for murder (DPIC "Year End Report" 2012). Since American support for the death penalty has declined substantially from 80 percent in 1994 to 63 percent in 2012 (Gallup 2012), it is an appropriate time to isolate the roots of America's staunch retention of the death penalty. Without providing a value judgment on the appropriateness of the death penalty as a policy, this paper simply seeks to apply a high level of scrutiny to an often overlooked but significant policy divergence in the Western world. An informed explanation of America's retention of the policy begins with the basic question: what explains variation in a Western democracy's retention or abolition of the death penalty?
This paper will begin with Section (1), a literature review of the major theories that past scholars and social scientists have put forth in regards to death penalty politics in modern Western democracies. Section (2) presents a joint hypothesis that was constructed based on recent academic literature in the field. Section (3) provides an overview of the methodology employed to test the hypothesis and Section (4) states the findings. Section (5) explores implications of the findings on the sustainability of death penalty abolition in Europe and potential death penalty abolition in the United States. Section (6) acknowledges the limitations of the study and puts forth suggestions for future research. Finally, Section (7) provides a conclusion