overnment e-petition website, a new democratic measure that allows the public to submit proposals to be debated in Parliament. If the Restore Justice e-petition gathers more than 100,000 signatures, Members of Parliament have agreed to open up debate on the floor and re-consider the issue of capital punishment in the United Kingdom (Cafe 2011). Considering this fresh development in European death penalty politics, the political proceedings in the coming years will be pivotal in the evaluation of the sustainability of the “anti-democratic abolition” of the death penalty in Great Britain.
2. The United States: Abolition Delayed
Considering the influences of the "tough on crime" agenda in politics, it is no surprise that support for the death penalty in America peaked at 80 percent in 1994. Crime politics in the 1990s created a climate where any position perceived as “soft on crime” was a serious political liability for conservatives and liberals alike (Gerber 2007, 199). In this time period, government leaders could be seen "echoing the lowest levels of public anger and fear" (Ibid., 200). Because Richard Nixon had effectively used this platform to tap into the electorate's pathos, Republican political strategists pushed a conservative crime and punishment agenda nationwide. In March 1991, President George Bush Sr. gave a rousing speech that framed an actively utilized death penalty as instrumental in “giving back our streets to America's families" (Bush 1991). For one of the more extreme examples in political discourse, Newt Gingrich proposed the death penalty for drug smuggling in 1996, citing his reasoning as, "I have made a decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this” (“Gingrich Suggests Tough Drug Measure” 1995).
The expectation of "tough on crime" rhetoric was not confined to Republicans and aggressively infiltrated the Democratic leadership agenda. In the 1988 presidential debate, Democratic Governor Mike Dukakis was asked if he would support the death penalty for someone that raped and killed his wife. Dukakis infamously appalled audiences when he insisted that his opposition of the death penalty was independent from those emotions. On the night of the debate, Dukakis's polling numbers dropped from 49% to 42% (Terry 2012). After this political debacle, Democratic officials were urged to stick to conservative death penalty positions. For example, Democratic President Bill Clinton ran three television advertisements for re-election that emphasized the expansion of death penalty statutes (Gerber 2007, 183). Crime control was so central to national politics that capital punishment had become "our nation's litmus test for measuring suitability to handle all the delicate affairs of high office, even those having nothing to do with capital punishment" (Gerber 2007, 183).
While death penalty statues had been primarily determined in state legislatures, the federal Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 passed with sweeping bipartisan support in Congress during this time period. While the first act expanded the punishment to apply to sixty new offenses, even some non-homicidal crimes, the second piece of legislation tightened habeas corpus laws in an attempt to speed up and reduce the cost of execution. The popularity of the "tough on crime" agenda did not just influence national legislation but also judicial and prosecutorial discretion. The 1990s saw a tremendous rise in the number of executions nationwide, from 117 to 763, an increase of nearly 650 percent between decades (Galliher 2002, 4). This American development in the 1990s provided a clear juxtaposition with Britain's gradual "phasing-out" of the institution despite temporal variations in death penalty opinion.
Summary of the Findings
The findings of the comparative historical analysis in both critical time periods support the hypothesis of the study. Considering that policy-making in democracies is invariably multi-causal, the findings merely suggest the re