EXECUTING SOCIAL INEQUALITY: PREDICTIVE FACTORS IN THE APPLICATION OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

The adoption and implementation of the death penalty varies greatly by state. This dissertation will attempt to explain these differences in terms of the characteristics identified as salient in the empirical and theoretical literature at the state level. Some of the questions addressed include: Are the differences among the states the result of Social Conditions, such as demographics and inequality? Do the political tendencies in political affiliations of the state legislatures explain why some states adopt capital punishment and execute and others do not? Do crime rates, in terms of homicide rates and hate crime rates, have an effect on the implementation of death penalty statutes? Using social control and social dominance theories, independent variables were selected to test these theories. Due to the fact that executions occur in only a few states, zero-inflated negative binomial regression models will be used to test bivariate and multivariate associations (Mwalili, Lesaffre, and Declerck 2007). Percentage of the population that African American, inequality rates, homicide rates, educational attainment, percentage of the population that is evangelical, hate crime rates, exonerations and percentage of the state legislature that is Republican are the independent variables analyzed and number of executions is the dependent variables analyzed. In addition, the percentage of the population that is African American was combined with the percentage of the population that is Hispanic was tested as well. All models controlled for region and year, while state population per million was used as an exposure variable, and the procedures were repeated in models lagged by 5 years. Results indicate that most of the independent variables are associated with the adoption of the death penalty in the bivariate modes (both non-lagged and lagged models). However, in the multivariate models, only hate crime rates and evangelicals were significant in explaining the differences in executions in the non-lagged models when region was removed. Evangelicals, hate crimes, and the combined race variable (% Black + % Hispanic) were significant in predicting states with the death penalty in the lagged models, while homicide rates were only significant in the first lagged model in predicting the adoption of capital punishment. These results support part of the framework used in this research, which includes features of sociological theories for understanding state level variation in the implementation of the death penalty. These results also bolster the argument that state policies are not merely reactions to murder rates, but are influenced by other social factors