The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis

By David Jacobs, J. Carmichael. American Sociological Review, 2002

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the interest in the death penalty, no statistical studies have isolated the social and political forces that account for the legality of this punishment. Racial or ethnic threat theories suggest that the death penalty will more likely be legal in jurisdictions with relatively large black or Hispanic populations. Economic threat explanations suggest that this punishment will be present in unequal areas. Jurisdictions with a more conservative public or a stronger law-and-order Republican party should be more likely to legalize the death penalty as well. After controlling for social disorganization, region, period, and violent crime, panel analyses suggest that minority presence and economic inequality enhance the likelihood of a legal death penalty. Conservative values and Republican strength in the legislature have equivalent effects. A supplemental time-to-event analysis supports these conclusions. The results suggest that a political approach has explanatory power because threat effects expressed through politics and effects that are directly political invariably account for decisions about the legality of capital punishment.

Subfields: Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6cb44e12f49a8866b1fde7b421ba2e28317cc48e

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Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analysis of Public Attitudes Toward Ex-Offenders (2016, background): “Dispositional attributions are based on the assumption that all individuals, including exoffenders, are responsible for their actions and, therefore, the consequences of those actions (Grasmick & McGill, 1994; Jacobs & Carmichael, 2002).”
Is the Glass Ceiling a Unique Form of Inequality? (2004, methodology): “For theoretical treatments of this analytic strategy, see Stata (2001) and Pendergast and colleagues (1996); see Jacobs and Carmichael (2002) for an application of this procedure to a pooled time-series analysis of imposition of the death penalty.”
Examining the Link Between Diversity and Firm Performance (2007, background): “Because estimators that are sensitive to both within-and between-subjects variance will produce more efficient estimates (Hsiao & Tahmiscioglu, 1997; Jacobs & Carmichael, 2002), we chose a random-effects estimator, which takes into account both kinds of variation.”
Restorative Justice in Schools (2015, background): “Percent Hispanic students is also included, aggregated from responses to the student questionnaire, as research has shown that the relative size of the Hispanic population affects the severity of criminal justice practices (Holmes et al., 1996; Jacobs & Carmichael, 2002).”
A TASTE FOR PUNISHMENT: Black and White Americans' Views on the Death Penalty and the War on Drugs (2004, background): “© 2004 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 1742-058X004 $9.50 DOI: 10.10170S1742058X04040081 151 criminal justice issues in the U+S+ today ~Beckett and Western, 2001; Garland 2001; Miller 1996;Wacquant 2001!+ To wit, after a century of relative stability, incarcerati”
On The So-Called “Huber Sandwich Estimator” and “Robust Standard Errors” (2006, background): “See, for instance, Gartner and Segura (2000), Jacobs and Carmichael (2002), Gould, Lavy, and Passerman (2004), or Lassen (2005).”
Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal?: ‘Redeemability’ and the Psychology of Punitive Public Attitudes (2009, background): “Scheingold (1984) argues that “hard-line” conservatives view offenders as free individuals who choose to prey on others, whereas liberals are “positivists” who argue that “crime is associated with poverty… weakened family structures, inadequate slum schools, limited job opportunities, and the like” ”
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (background): “…these approaches, and the last half century has witnessed a considerable shift and progress in our studies;7 yet much remains to be done for the field of ancient art, specifically sculpture, to be ranked by most archaeologists at the same "objective" level of, say, Greek epigraphy and architecture.”
Explaining Spatial Variation in Support for Capital Punishment: A Multilevel Analysis1 (2003, background): “Moreover, they are significantly correlated with one or more of the contextual predictors that form the focus of our analysis (see app. table A2), and they may influence death penalty support (Garland 2000; Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).”
The Pragmatic American: Attributions of Crime and the Hydraulic Relation Hypothesis (2010, methodology): “For example, scholars have long noted that the majority of Americans support punitive policies such as the death penalty, harsher courts, and three-strikes laws (Cochran & Chamlin, 2005; Tyler & Boeckmann, 1997; Unnever, Cullen, & Bartkowski, 2006; Unnever, Cullen, & Fisher, 2005; Unnever, Cullen, &”