alyses 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 Great Britain occurred in 1964 and the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act of 1965 suspended the death penalty sanction for murder, the United States established a similar national moratorium period for executions from 1972 to 1976 while the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the practice. However, America diverged with Great Britain at this time when the Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment and therefore could not be abolished by federal mandate. In the final section of the historical analysis, I examine the third crucial time period, the 1990s. The 1990s was the ultimate period of differentiation in capital punishment policy, as the United States dramatically expanded the institution through “tough on crime” political efforts while the British House of Commons repeatedly denied motions to re-institute capital punishment in Great Britain.
In examining these three crucial time periods, the comparative historical analysis employs several methods of original research to accurately track trends in death penalty politics, including polling data, discourse analysis and documentary analysis. In terms of historical polling, the data came from Ipso MORI for Great Britain and Gallup for the United States. In terms of discourse analysis, the paper relies on archived articles from The Times (referred to as the London Times in the United States) and the New York Times. Finally, in terms of documentary analysis, the paper uses transcripts from proceedings in the British House of Commons and speeches made by American political officials. Ultimately, this paper uses original documents and other primary sources to test a new structural theory on how death penalty politics historically progressed in two major Western democracies.
Before the findings of the comparative historical analysis are presented, a brief inquiry into the differences between American and British political structures is required. The United States is essentially a collection of de