Death penalty policy

I just finished reading ‘The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence’ (link, link to book’s website) by Frank Baumgartner, Suzana De Boef and Amber Boydstun. It is a fine study of the rise of the ‘innocence’ frame and the decline of the use of capital punishment in the US (I have recently posted about the death penalty). The book has received well-deserved praise from several academic corners (list of reviews here). In this post I want to focus on several issues that, in my opinion, deserve further discussion. One of the major contributions of the book is methodological. The systematic study of policy frames (‘discourse’ is a related concept that seems to be getting out of fashion) is in many ways the holy grail of policy analysis – while we all intuitively feel that words and arguments and ideas matter more than standard models of collective decision making allow, it is quite tricky to demonstrate when and how these words and arguments and ideas matter. Policy frame analysis became something of a hype during the late 1970s and the 1980s, but it delivered less than it promised, so people started to look away (as this Google Ngram shows). Baumgartner, De Boef and Boydstun have produced a book with the potential to re-invigorate research into the impact of policy frames. So far, the usual way to analyze quantitatively policy frames has been to count the number of newspaper articles on a topic, measure their tone (pro/anti) and classify the arguments into some predefined clusters (the frames). This is what the authors do with respect…

Does the death penalty lead to a lower number of homicides? A recent paper by Charles Manski and John Pepper argues that, on the basis of existing US data, we do not know. Both positive and negative effects of the application of the death penalty are consistent with the observed homicide rates in the US. The argument itself is not new (see for example this 2006 paper by John J. Donohue III and Justin Wolfers) but Manski and Pepper’s text is still very interesting and highly instructive. Manski and Pepper strip the problem to the core. Say we only have four observation points – the average yearly homicide rates for ’75 and ’77 in two sets of states that either did (A) or (B) did not reinstate the death penalty after the moratorium was lifted with the 1976 Gregg decision. So in 1975 both sets of states did not have a death penalty while in 1977 group A had reinstated it. I reworked the table with the rates into the figure below. The red dots show the homicide rates in the ‘death penalty’ states and the blue ones in the remaining ones. The authors show that on the basis of these four numbers, there are at least three point estimates of the effect of the death penalty that we can derive from the data depending on the assumptions that we are willing to make. First, we can assume that the selection of individual states into the two groups (‘death penalty’…

Category: Death penalty policy

The decline of the death penalty

The deterrent effect of the death penalty