Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was not inherently unconstitutional, most states have adopted capital punishment statutes. Yet execution rates vary considerably from state to state. The objective of this work is to analyze the degree by which political culture is a determinant of states' implementation of capital punishment. This article finds that political culture, as measured by Daniel Elazar's prototype classifications of American political subcultures, is an important determinant of the adoption of death penalty statutes and the frequency of executions. Specifically, states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic political culture are more likely to have adopted a death penalty statute and to execute inmates more frequently. The link between political culture and the death penalty remains strong and stable even when controlling for a host of other factors that have been linked to the death penalty in prior research.
This study analyzes the important role state political culture played in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump appealed to demographically distinct types of voters in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses that varied considerably from previous Republican presidential nominees. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, this study fi nds that state political culture played an outsized role in determining Donald Trump's relative level of support in a particular state. When state demographics are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state partisanship and Daniel Elazar's state political culture typology, political culture proves to be a signifi cant determinant of the level of support given to Trump in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are considerably more likely to have given Trump a lower share of the vote while voters in states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were more likely to support Trump.
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