Support for the Reinstatement of the Death Penalty as a Protest Attitude Against the Judiciary: The Role of Social Context

Session

Political Science & International Relations

Description

Whereas the dominant literature related to people’s attitudes toward the death penalty connect the variability of those attitudes with either fear of crime or fear/distrust toward the judicial system, we test our argument that high support for the death penalty and its reinstatement might reflect protest attitude against an untrustworthy judiciary, and more so when people state their attitudes toward the reinstatement of the death penalty than when they state their principled attitudes toward the death penalty. We frame this as a protest attitude. We replicate two sets of ordered probit models on data from a probability sample of 1414 respondents in Albania collected in 2015 via a cell phone random digit dialing technique (RDD). We found respondents’ support for the reinstatement of the death penalty reflects people’s lack of trust in the judiciary, but not necessarily them prioritizing fight against crime.

Keywords:

death penalty reinstatement; distrust toward the judiciary; prioritizing fight against crime; protest attitude; normative statement; policy preference

Session Chair

Ridvan Peshkopia

Session Co-Chair

Ramadan Ilazi

Proceedings Editor

Edmond Hajrizi

ISBN

978-9951-437-54-7

Location

Durres, Albania

Start Date

28-10-2017 3:00 PM

End Date

28-10-2017 4:30 PM

DOI

10.33107/ubt-ic.2017.325

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Oct 28th, 3:00 PM Oct 28th, 4:30 PM

Support for the Reinstatement of the Death Penalty as a Protest Attitude Against the Judiciary: The Role of Social Context

Durres, Albania

Whereas the dominant literature related to people’s attitudes toward the death penalty connect the variability of those attitudes with either fear of crime or fear/distrust toward the judicial system, we test our argument that high support for the death penalty and its reinstatement might reflect protest attitude against an untrustworthy judiciary, and more so when people state their attitudes toward the reinstatement of the death penalty than when they state their principled attitudes toward the death penalty. We frame this as a protest attitude. We replicate two sets of ordered probit models on data from a probability sample of 1414 respondents in Albania collected in 2015 via a cell phone random digit dialing technique (RDD). We found respondents’ support for the reinstatement of the death penalty reflects people’s lack of trust in the judiciary, but not necessarily them prioritizing fight against crime.