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Death Penalty: The Political Foundations of the Global Trend Towards Abolition

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Abstract

The death penalty is like no other punishment. Its continued existence in many countries of the world creates political tensions within these countries and between governments of retentionist and abolitionist countries. After the Second World War, more and more countries have abolished the death penalty. This article argues that the major determinants of this global trend towards abolition are political, a claim which receives support in a quantitative cross-national analysis from 1950 to 2002. Democracy, democratisation, international political pressure on retentionist countries and peer group effects in relatively abolitionist regions all raise the likelihood of abolition. There is also a partisan effect, as abolition becomes more likely if the chief executive’s party is left wing-oriented. Cultural, social and economic determinants receive only limited support. The global trend towards abolition will go on if democracy continues to spread around the world and abolitionist countries stand by their commitment to press for abolition all over the world.

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Notes

  1. Since then, however, Turkmenistan has abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 1999.

  2. Sixty people were executed in the United States in 2005 (Amnesty International 2006).

  3. Note, however, that in some cases, the excessive application of the death penalty during wartime can prompt a country to abolish totally the death penalty after a regime transition. This is what happened to Germany after the Second World War when abolition formed an integral part of the new democratic constitution.

  4. Still today, as Wyman (1997) and Dunér and Geurtsen (2002) point out, cultural relativists and with them many non-Western governments like to argue that the abolition of the death penalty is a Western concept alien to other cultures.

  5. Similar points are regularly raised in reports and resolutions of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

  6. Religious arguments have of course been employed in favour of the death penalty by representatives of other denominations as well.

  7. No other regional or supra-national institution has taken a similarly firm view on abolition or has been willing to exert its political leverage to a similar extent.

  8. Krain (1997) has calculated a measure of ethnic fractionalization over time, albeit for only 70 countries. The measures at 10-year intervals between 1948 and 1978 are all correlated at 0.98 or higher, which demonstrates that this variable hardly changes over time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Eric Neumayer

  2. Center for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway

    Eric Neumayer

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  1. Eric Neumayer
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Neumayer, E. Death Penalty: The Political Foundations of the Global Trend Towards Abolition. Hum Rights Rev 9, 241–268 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0044-0

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