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Association: Name: The Midwest Political Science Association URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~mpsa/
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p82615_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Hurwitz, Jon. and Peffley, Mark. "Race and the Death Penalty: The Determinants and Resilience of Attitudes toward Capital Punishment among Whites and African Americans" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, Apr 15, 2004 <Not Available>. 2008-10-10 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p82615_index.html>

Hurwitz, J. and Peffley, M. , 2004-04-15 "Race and the Death Penalty: The Determinants and Resilience of Attitudes toward Capital Punishment among Whites and African Americans" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois <Not Available>. 2008-10-10 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p82615_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: It is plain to virtually everyone—at both the mass and elite levels—that it is impossible to think about the death penalty in American without thinking about race. Given the strong racial component to this extraordinarily contentious and important policy, it is important to understand how whites and blacks conceptualize the issue—a topic that has received scant attention in the literature. In this paper, we attempt to explore the racial thinking behind capital punishment in the following ways. First, we examine inter-racial differences in support of the policy. Second, and more significantly, we explore the determinants of death penalty attitudes among both whites and African-Americans, both to understand the origins of such beliefs and to see if both races come to their beliefs in the same fashion. While prior studies (e.g., Soss et al, 2003) have successfully explained whites’ support of capital punishment, they have been notably less successful in explaining these same attitudes among blacks. Most importantly, we examine the resilience of such beliefs, paying particular attention to how support for capital punishment is affected by various arguments against it. At the superficial level, it would seem that most individuals hold well crystallized positions on this policy, inasmuch as such policies are “easy” for the average individual to grasp. Such beliefs, consequently, should be resistant to change. But is this assumption necessarily true? With religious, racial, human rights, and other organizations, not to mention ever larger numbers of political leaders from across the ideological spectrum, sounding an increasingly steady drumbeat against the sentence, and attempting to weaken the strong consensus of support in the American polity in the process, it is important to understand the efficacy of these arguments. The heart of this analysis, therefore, will consist of examining responses to a survey experiment in which individuals in a national survey were randomly assigned to different arguments against the death penalty: a racial argument (i.e., capital punishment is applied in a racially discriminatory fashion), a nonracial argument (i.e., capital punishment may take the life of innocent individuals) and a control (no argument) condition. We explore how blacks and whites are differentially affected by such arguments, as well as the individual-level characteristics responsible for shifts in death penalty support across argument conditions. Three findings are especially noteworthy: (1) African-American citizens are much more responsive to arguments against the death penalty than whites, who, if anything, are more likely to support the death penalty when confronted with an argument against it. (2) Among both whites and blacks, beliefs about whether the criminal justice system is racial biased affect the success of different arguments in lowering support. (3) And racial prejudice is a strong determinant of beliefs about racial bias among both blacks and whites. Our results have important implications for understanding interracial conflict as well as the possibilities for developing diverse coalitions of citizens opposed to the death penalty.

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