 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 management of information, this study calls for other researchers who are unfamiliar with the content of the policy or who are diametrically opposed to abolition to re-examine the "anti-democratic" phenomenon. For American researchers hoping to circumvent the unconscious influence of an American cultural mentality, research into Belarus, the only remaining European retentionist country, is highly encouraged as an excellent supplement to the findings of this study.
By eliminating intervening variables present in past studies, this comparative historical analysis of death penalty politics in Great Britain and the United States hopes to move the literature closer to a richer understanding of what explains variation in a Western democracy's retention or abolition of the death penalty. While a few American states will likely abolish death penalty in the coming decade, the politically entrenched regions of the South and Midwest will continue to aggravate the tensions between the United States and Western Europe over this significant policy divergence. “Triggering events” will shine a light on this division and hopefully catalyze meaningful public debate and further academic inquiries on the matter. For example, the Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 84 people in a summer camp in July 2011, served to test and reinforce Europe's newly ingrained principles on the death penalty. When the Norway mass killer received a maximum of 21 years for one of the worst mass shootings in history, outrage over Norway's leniency sparked a cross-Atlantic comparison with another recent notorious murderer James Holmes, who is awaiting trail and possible execution in Colorado for killing 12 people during a Batman movie screening. The coinciding of these two “triggering events” and the subsequent ways the U.S. and European systems handle policies hereafter will provide yet another interesting historical juxtaposition for the continued study of this policy divergence in the Western world.
"1969: MPs Vote to Abolish Hanging." 201