The Gender Gap in Support for Capital Punishment: A Test of Attribution Theory

Boots, Denise Paquette; Cochran, John K.

doi:10.1080/08974454.2011.584461

Cited by 17 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Similar to research attempts to account for the racial divide in death penalty support, attempts to account for the gender gap have only been partially successful. That is, while several of these efforts have been able to attenuate some of the observed gender gap in death penalty support, no study to date has been able to reduce the gender effect on death penalty support to nonsignificance (see Boots & Cochran, ; Cochran & Sanders, ; Lambert, Clarke, Tucker‐Gail, & Hogan, ; Stack, ). The studies by Lambert et al () and Boots and Cochran () stressed the influence of attribution styles and gender socialization differences, but these factors were not successful in fully attenuating the gender gap in death penalty support.…”

Section: Gender Death Penalty Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, while several of these efforts have been able to attenuate some of the observed gender gap in death penalty support, no study to date has been able to reduce the gender effect on death penalty support to nonsignificance (see Boots & Cochran, 2011;Cochran & Sanders, 2009;Lambert, Clarke, Tucker-Gail, & Hogan, 2009;Stack, 2000). The studies by Lambert et al (2009) and Boots and Cochran (2011) stressed the influence of attribution styles and gender socialization differences, but these factors were not successful in fully attenuating the gender gap in death penalty support. Less theoretically focused, the study by Cochran and Sanders (2009) examined a wide array of potential attenuating variables but was also unable to account for the gender gap in death penalty support.…”

Section: Gender Death Penalty Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Can empathy close the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support?

Godcharles

Rad

Heide

et al. 2019

Behavioral Sci & The Law

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Public opinion data indicate that the majority of US respondents support the death penalty. Research has consistently indicated, however, that Blacks and females are significantly less likely to support capital punishment than their White and male counterparts. Past research efforts attempting to account for these differences have, at best, only partially accounted for them: the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support, while narrowed, remained evident. This study proposes that empathy, particularly ethnocultural empathy, may be a key explanatory correlate of death penalty support and that racial and gender differences in empathy may fully explain the observed racial and gender differences in death penalty support. This study uses three forms of empathy measures (cognitive, affective, and ethnocultural) to test this hypothesis using survey data from a sample of undergraduate students. Our results show that neither a variety of other “known correlates” of death penalty support nor cognitive or affective empathy scales were able to fully account for the observed racial difference in death penalty support. Ethnocultural empathy, however, was successful in reducing the effect of race on death penalty support to nonsignificance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to have done so.

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Section: Gender Death Penalty Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gender Death Penalty Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can empathy close the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support?

Godcharles

Rad

Heide

et al. 2019

Behavioral Sci & The Law

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…But, as Jacobs and Carmichael () argue, conservatives’ and liberals’ diverging views on the causes of criminal behavior may be especially important for understanding the association between political ideology and concerns about crime. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to attribute crime to structural forces that are beyond the control of the individual, such as poverty, racism, a violent home life, peer group influence, and limited educational and employment opportunities (Boots and Cochran, ; Cochran, Boots, and Chamlin, ; Unnever et al., ), and those situational attributions foster a less punitive reaction and promote greater optimism about the benefits of rehabilitation and resocialization (Cochran, Boots, and Chamlin, ; Cochran, Boots, and Heide, ; Unnever et al., ). Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to view criminals as autonomous agents who are unfettered by such structural forces, leading them to attribute criminal behavior to the offender's personal qualities, such as laziness, bad character, and a lack of self‐control, internal attributions that foster a more punitive and less rehabilitative approach to punishment.…”

Section: The Switch Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Ideology and Concerns About White‐Collar Crime: Exploring the Switch Hypothesis

Kroska

Schmidt

Schleifer

2019

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective Numerous studies show that political conservatives in the United States are more concerned about crime than are political liberals. But, according to the “switch hypothesis,” the direction of the association should reverse when the focus is on reducing and punishing white‐collar crime. Despite the intuitiveness of this hypothesis, however, only one study to date has directly tested it. Method We explore the hypothesis using data from an online survey administered to undergraduate, graduate, and law students at a southern university. We include a wide range of controls, including demographic attributes, socioeconomic indicators, street crime victimization, white‐collar crime victimization, and a composite measure of trust in professionals. Results As hypothesized, political conservatives are less concerned about reducing and punishing white‐collar crime than are political liberals, and the association is stronger for men than it is for women, patterns that hold with and without the controls. The main effect of conservatism also holds (1) when examined with structural equation modeling, (2) when each item of the dependent variable is examined separately with stereotype logistic regression, and (3) when the sample is weighted to match the gender and race/ethnicity distribution in the population from which it was drawn. Conclusion Consistent with the switch hypothesis, the results suggest that conservatives are less concerned about white‐collar crime than are liberals.

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“…The Web site postings also reveal variation in support for particular executions, as indicated by hostility toward the condemned prisoner. Scholarship on support for the death penalty has largely focused on the social and psychological characteristics of supporters (see, e.g., Boots and Cochran ; Unnever and Cullen ). The comments posted to http://prodeathpenalty.com allow us to address a different question: Among those who favor the death penalty, is support greater in some instances than others?…”

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confidence: 99%

The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

Phillips¹,

Cooney²

2015

Law Soc Rev

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In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such example is http://prodeathpenalty.com, a Web site created by supporters of capital punishment that permits members to post comments about particular executions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the movement of social time. Testing Black's theory, we find that the number of online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational, vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue that Black's theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.

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The Gender Gap in Support for Capital Punishment: A Test of Attribution Theory

Cited by 17 publications

References 67 publications

Can empathy close the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support?

Can empathy close the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support?

Political Ideology and Concerns About White‐Collar Crime: Exploring the Switch Hypothesis

The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

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