Party affiliation and support for capital punishment: An assessment of lawmakers from Canada and the United States

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article assesses the attitudes supporting capital punishment among lawmakers from two democratic countries — Canada and the United States. Accordingly, data were collected from three different populations responsible for legislating law either permitting or prohibiting the use of capital punishment in their respective jurisdictions — the Canadian House of Commons and the Michigan and Ohio state legislatures. These data were used to assess two general hypotheses: (1) Conservative parties will report higher levels of support for capital punishment; and, (2) Individual members from liberal political parties will report lower levels of support for capital punishment when compared to members of more conservative parties. The research findings supported both hypotheses.