 and a look to the future of transatlantic death penalty politics in the 21st century.
The first step in this academic inquiry is to examine the popularly cited answers to America's idiosyncratic retention of the death penalty and assess their merit in the social science field. Two variables that are often discussed in the public forum are the nation's homicide rate and the influence of special interests. The most common kneejerk explanation for America's retention of the death penalty is the assertion that high homicide rates, spurred by lack of gun control and urban crime, make the death penalty a more urgent mechanism than in small European nations. While the United States homicide rate is higher than most European countries, the national murder rate has dropped dramatically from almost 10% in 1990 to 4.7% in 2011 (DPIC "Murder Rates Nationally and By State" 2013). Additionally, if high homicide rates are a compelling variable for death penalty retention, the internal state-by-state trends of abolition in America offer an entirely contradictory trend. For example, Maryland, a state with one of the highest murder rates at 7.5%, just abolished the death penalty in 2013. Meanwhile Texas, a state with a murder rate of only 4.4%, retains and actively uses the death penalty. In this way, the homicide rate answer does not emerge as a prominent variable.
Secondly, individuals are often apt to attribute retention of any potentially outdated policy to the influence of special interests, in this case a lack of power in the anti-death penalty advocacy community. Ironically, the United States was one of the success sites for death penalty reformers led by Cesare Beccaria's doctrine in the 1780s (Hood & Hoyle, 11). While the policy decisions on the death penalty in European nations were certainly influenced by lobbying groups and the political advocacy of leaders like Sydney Silverman in Great Britain, neither actors can compare to the massive influence of lobbyist giants like Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union in the United States today. Furthermore, the survival of the death penalty as a policy is peculiar among other legislative issues because the pro-death penalty lobby is hardly an organized force at the national or state level. Considering this logic, neither homicide rates nor the influence of special interests are recognized as significant variables under review today.
A review of the literature concerning death penalty abolition in different countries has revealed the prevalence of two significant competing theories, cultural disposition and political structure (Guess 1999, 54) . Building on previous work, this literature review examines comparative historical analyses and longitudinal case studies that identify at least one of these theories in the findings. This narrowing process exposed an ongoing academic debate over whether political structure or cultural disposition is the defining variable that explains a Western democracy's policy towards execution. After reviewing a range of findings, it is clear that the academic literature now slant heavily towards a political structure explanation.
In the comparative historical analysis “Transatlantic Perspectives on Capital Punishment,” Austin Sarat and Jurgen Martschukat explore the historical differences between the United States and Europe and identify both cultural disposition and political structure as key indicators of abolition (Sarat and Martschukat 2011). The article first discusses the influence of cultural disposition, for example how the American death penalty can be seen as a "vestige of frontier mentality" (Ibid., 6). The authors then discuss the influence of a more "porous" political structure, for example how the two-year term in the U.S. House of Representatives ties public officials to the emotions of their constituents. Sarat and Martschukat argue, “the European experience posits this: public opinion tends to follow decisions by political elites rather than leading them" (Ibid., 4). The findings suggest that cultural disposition and