need to pass a public referendum based on different state laws. For example, in November 2012, California put death penalty abolition on the ballot but Proposition 34 was defeated by 52.8% to 47.2% when the public took a direct vote (Mintz 2012). Given these factors, grassroots campaigns have a long journey ahead of them if they hope to galvanize public sentiment towards abolition on a state-by-state basis and overpower the American structural bind that only allows change from the bottom up instead of top down.
Nevertheless, the historical findings of "anti-democratic" abolition in Great Britain do not need to imply that America's populist bind eliminates the chance of an imminent change in death penalty policy. First, the role of bold political leadership is not to be disregarded. Although it is a rarity in American politics, the adoption of a Burkean trustee position has been known to occur in state politics on execution. While few American political representatives are willing to vote against the preferences of their constituents and risk looking “soft on crime,” former New York Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo and former California Governor Jerry Brown are three exceptions to this rule. These governors vetoed death penalty legislation despite the strong will of their state constituents (Bohm 2003, 28). Most recently, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley took a substantial political risk with his rumored bid for the 2016 American presidency in order to push death penalty repeal in the Maryland legislature (Jacobs 2013). If the death penalty emerges as a national topic for debate in the 2016 presidential elections, the public discourse and rhetoric surrounding Governor O'Malley's campaign could serve as an excellent case study in the populist politics of death penalty abolition going forward.
Limitations of Study
As in any honest academic inquiry, this study has weaknesses and limitations that could be improved upon in future research. The first limitation concerns technical flaws with examining public polling data in a comparative historical analysis, across time periods and across agencies. First, the study was confronted with the absence of original polling data in the 1960s in Great Britain because the Ipso MORI polling agency was founded a year after 1969. Nevertheless, the historical analysis substantiated claims by using a cross-reference of London Times articles and archived transcripts of the British Parliament debates that cite the same numbers. On a broader level, when examining polling data across decades and different agencies, it is difficult to examine the consistency and quality of the questions asked in different surveys. For example, Gallup and other agencies now often ask Americans to gauge their support for the death penalty if life without parole is the alternative sanction. Research has shown that when individuals are presented with another tough alternative to the death penalty, they are much less likely to support death penalty retention in the polls (Clear & Cole 2010, 549). For example, in a May 2012 Texas Tribune poll, Texans supported the death penalty 73% without alternatives listed and expressed 53% support for death penalty as a preference over life without parole (Ramsey 2012). These are just a few discrepancies that usually accompany the large-scale analysis of public polling data and compel the tolerance of a slight margin of error.
The second limitation is the intellectual limitations of the researcher in removing all value judgments from the social science research. In evaluating why a policy divergence exists, researchers strive to transcend value judgments or biases concerning the content of the policy under review. However, how the researcher approaches such a complex policy divergence is inherently affected by the assumption that abolition is a positive or negative trend. Additionally, researchers evaluating the cultural dispositions of their own country cannot be entirely isolated or immune to the influences of the very culture under review. In order to mitigate any unconscious