ten essential on the path to abolition. By building on the findings of Gerber and Johnson, Hammel enhances the political structures theory and further supports its validity as a fresh explanation for variation in a Western democracy's policy on the death penalty.
Together, recent scholars have created the foundation for a hypothesis that is worth exploring. A literature review on this complex issue reveals a provocative idea: is abolition or retention of the death penalty steered by a Western nation's political structure of democracy? Keeping in mind the dimension added by Hammel, political structure theory considers the influence of a) institutional make-up and b) the decision-making practices that accompany these institutions. The theory must be two-fold because both elements inform each other in a cycle. With this relationship in mind, I seek to tighten the corresponding hypotheses presented by Gerber & Johnson and Hammel by examining the influence of differing political structures through a comparative historical analysis of the United States and Great Britain.
The United States has not abolished the death penalty because American political institutions are more democratic in structure than Great Britain. In this hypothesis, “more democratic” refers to a) an institutional make-up that gives constituents immediate control over their representatives and b) populist decision-making practices that encourage respect for public opinion over a public official's individual conscience.
A comprehensive comparative historical analysis of the United States and Great Britain is an appropriate method for substantiating the controversial premise of this hypothesis. A comparative historical analysis is a type of explanatory research that uses systematic comparison between two cases and the analysis of processes over time in order to explain large political phenomena and often predict possible outcomes to current events (Mahoney 2004). As demonstrated in the literature review, many scholars have used comparative historical analyses or longitudinal studies of the United States and Europe as a framework for examining the factors of successful and unsuccessful movements for death penalty abolition. Social scientists in the field tend to agree "scrutiny of the transatlantic situation of capital punishment and punitiveness is crucial if we are to understand where America is on the road to abolition and what the European experience has to offer" (Sarat and Martschukat 2011, 13).
Given the diversity of legal systems and political cultures across Europe, I suggest the alternative strategy of a comparative historical analysis of the United States and Great Britain. After all, many European countries, such as Italy and France, maintain a civil law system with very different legal procedures. With a collective ancestry, the United States and Great Britain share a common law system, basic cultural customs, and long history of using execution as the ultimate sanction. By comparing two nations that are so closely related in legal system and cultural custom, third variables can be easily isolated and set aside as explanations. In this way, a comparative historical analysis of the United States and Great Britain helps to narrow the search for what may explain variation in a Western nation's retention or abolition of the death penalty.
This comparative historical analysis focuses on three crucial time periods in the historical evolution of capital punishment in the United States and Great Britain. In the first section, I examine the early historical roots of the death penalty in U.S. and Great Britain in order to confirm that similar legal developments did indeed occur in both regions. A review of this time period is critical for validating the basic premise of the comparative historical analysis and a logical elimination of intervening variables. In the second section, I examine the time period of the 1960s-1970s, during which the first major divergence in capital punishment policy manifested between the two nations. While the last execution in Grea