Abolition of the death penalty. An event history analysis of the political, cultural and socioeconomic determinants of death penalty abolition.

Abstract

During the past 50 years, more and more countries have abolished the death penalty. Today,more than half of the countries of the world have removed capital punishment from theirlaws for crimes such as murder. The use of the death penalty is highly controversial, andregularly creates political tension between countries with differing perspectives on the issue.Nevertheless, very little research has been devoted to studying the determinants of deathpenalty abolition. This thesis is intended as one step towards filling that gap, and studies thepolitical, cultural and socio-economic determinants of abolition of the death penalty.A range of political, cultural and socio-economic factors that are hypothesised to influencethe likelihood of abolition are presented. The hypotheses are tested empirically on 145countries observed in from 1960 to 2004. Event history analysis, more specifically a semiparametricCox proportional hazards model, is employed. Event history analysis is ideallysuited for this research question, as it models both the duration until abolition and theoccurrence or non-occurrence of abolition, under the assumption that countries with a higherlikelihood of abolition will do away with capital punishment quicker than countries with alower likelihood. The results show that political factors, including level of democracy,democratic transitions, the political orientation of the executive, experience with war, andabolitionist pressure, are more important in determining abolition than cultural and socioeconomicfactors. This conclusion is supported by previous research. However, the analysisalso introduces variables that previously have not been included in analyses of abolition, andoperationalises variables in new ways. This brings several new and very interesting findingsto the study of death penalty abolition. For instance, the results indicate that abolitionistpressure may be successfully applied through international economic relations, and not justthe political and regional channels that have previously been explored.Furthermore, abolition of the death penalty is operationalised in two different manners in thisanalysis, as abolition for all crimes or as abolition for ordinary crimes, which mainlyinvolves that countries may retain the death penalty for war-time crimes. The results indicatethat the distinction between the two forms of abolition is not irrelevant, as several of theindependent variables influence the two differently.