NCJ Number
214468
Journal
Journal of Crime and Justice Volume: 29 Issue: 1 Dated: 2006 Pages: 45-79
Date Published
2006
Length
35 pages
Annotation
This study attempts to offer an account for how and/or why political party and political ideology may be causally associated with support for the death penalty.
Abstract
Conservatives and Republicans are more inclined to support capital punishment because they are more inclined to adopt a dispositional attribution style which stresses the individual responsibility, deservedness, and moral culpability of the criminal offender. In other words, those inclined to stress individual responsibility, define behavior as the product of choice and free will, and as such, these individuals are to be held responsible for their conduct. However, those who tend to stress social responsibility (i.e. Democrats and/or liberals) see behavior as the product of situationally limited or bounded choice, behavior that is not solely the product of free-will, but influenced by social, economic, and other external/situational/environmental forces. Attribution theory argues that people have a basic need to understand the events in their everyday lives and tend to employ one of two styles of attribution causation: dispositional (actions are due to internal characteristics of the actor/offender) or situational (caused by environmental or outside influences). In relation to this study, attribution theory offers a unique theoretical tool to account for the consistently observed association between political ideology and support for capital punishment. In this study, attribution theory is discussed as it relates to explaining attitudes toward crime and punishment. It identifies the relationship between dispositional and situational attributions for the cause of crime and support for various punishment philosophies. Study data were obtained from jury pool surveys administered during the winter of 2000 in Hillsborough County, FL. Tables, and references