Republican governor, unified government, and the U.S. states’ death penalty executions

ABSTRACT

Currently, 24 states in the U.S. still permit the death penalty, along with three states temporarily suspending it. Nevertheless, there exists substantial variation in the extent to which each state actually carries out the executions. While studies have explored factors influencing this variation, little attention has been paid to the political role of state governors’ and legislatures’ support in the different tendencies toward death penalty executions across states. To fill this gap, we empirically tested how governors’ party affiliation and unified political support from the legislature affect death penalty executions in the U.S. We demonstrated that states with a Republican governor are more likely to execute the death penalty. Additionally, we found that this tendency is significantly stronger when both chambers of the state legislature are dominated by Republicans (i.e. Republican-unified government), which is consistent with the theoretical expectation of unified government discourse in the policy making and implementation contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Death penalty execution
• governor
• unified government
• political party

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

2. Shepherd (2004) adds the importance of celerity in punishment, arguing that the shorter the wait between sentences and executions, the greater the deterrent effects.

3. Except for the work by Ehrlich, most studies in support of substantial deterrent effects of state executions on murders/homicides have used the post-moratorium data. Unlike them, Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd (2006) included both the pre-and post-moratorium period (1960–2000) in the analysis and confirmed the deterrent effects of executions on murder; they also revealed that murder rates increased during the state moratorium.

4. McCann included both death sentences and executions as dependent variables to see the effect of state threat, state conservatism, and the interaction between them on the death penalty.

5. Jacobs et al. (2007) show that the minority inmates (i.e. African American and Hispanic) on death row face a greater likelihood of being executed if their victims are white.

6. The Vuong test generates a z-value of 3.84 (at p < .001), suggesting the ZINB model’s significant improvement over the NB model.

7. Expenditures for police protection, all judicial and legal functions (including prosecution, courts, and public defense), and corrections (Aug 2, 2022, last accessed at https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/justice-expenditure-and-employment-extracts-series).

8. Public opinion can be a powerful influence on governors’ decisions because citizen values are thought to direct public policy in a democratic system (Key, 1961). We endeavored to gather public opinion poll data asking citizens’ opinion of the death penalty in each state and year, but we could not locate the data. Instead, we used ‘state citizen ideology’ because public opinion is roughly equivalent to the liberal-conservative continuum of mass public ideology in respect of morality policies (Mooney & Lee, 2000)

9. For example, some mainline Protestant denominations oppose the death penalty, while major evangelical denominations accept it (Wozniak & Lewis, 2010).

10. A Gallup poll regarding the death penalty was conducted twice in 2019 with different questions and samples, and the second part of the poll, which was administered from October 14 to 31, asked Americans to choose which approach they prefer between the death penalty and life imprisonment with no possibility of parole to punish murder.

11. Variables: 1.Republican governor, 2. Republicans-controlled legislature, 3. Unified Democratic government, 4. Republican governor & Democrats-controlled legislature, 5. Democratic governor & Republicans-controlled legislature, 6. Democratic governor & divided legislature, 7. Republican governor & divided legislature, 8. Inter-party competition, 9. Justice Expenditure, 10. Size of regulatory bureaucracy, 11. The number of death sentencing per 1,000 murders, 12. Incarceration, 13. Citizen Ideology, 14. Proportion of prisoners on death row, 15. Religion, 16. Population, 17. Black, 18. Education, 19. Southern state

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Incheon National University [Incheon National University Research Grant in 2022].

Notes on contributors

Gook Jin Kim

Gook Jin Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at Incheon National University. His research interests cover organizational behavior in public sector, policy diffusion, and policy process.

Namhoon Ki

Namhoon Ki is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration/Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University. His research interests include public management, government workers’ motivation, local government, network governance, and research methods.

Na Yeon Kim

Na Yeon Kim is a lecturer in the Department of Public Administration at Kookmin University. Her research interests include policy implementation and evaluation, social justice and public management.