The use of capital punishment has fallen to historically low levels in recent years. This year, Virginia became the first Southern state to outlaw the practice.<\/p>\n
Support for the death penalty has been in decline since the 1990s, when close to four in five Americans were for it. On the campaign trail last year, Joe Biden committed to ending capital punishment nationwide (though he hasn\u2019t taken any major steps to follow through on that since taking office).<\/p>\n
Still, a solid majority of Americans continue to favor keeping the death penalty, driven by the conviction that it\u2019s morally justified in cases of murder \u2014 even though most of the country recognizes that there are racial disparities in how it\u2019s doled out, and an overwhelming majority admits that it sometimes results in the death of an innocent person.<\/p>\n
We can say all this with relative certainty thanks to a Pew Research Center poll released today. Sixty percent considered the death penalty acceptable for people convicted of murder, according to the survey of Pew\u2019s online American Trends Panel.<\/p>\n
But arguably the most intriguing part of the report wasn\u2019t the numbers themselves. It was how those numbers might have looked, if the pollsters had used an older method: phone calls.<\/p>\n
Until this year, Pew contacted at least some of its respondents via phone, allowing researchers to compare results between so-called modes. They found that on certain policy-related questions \u2014 particularly morally or ethically sensitive ones \u2014 there could be significant differences between people\u2019s responses to self-administered online surveys and to live telephone interviewers.<\/p>\n
Polls on the death penalty presented one of the most glaring examples. More than other issues \u2014 and far more than on questions about candidate choice, which generally aren\u2019t as deeply impacted by survey mode \u2014 capital punishment drew meaningfully different responses.<\/p>\n
Last year, participants of Pew\u2019s online panel were 13 points more likely than those surveyed by phone to say they approved of the death penalty. Among Democrats, there was a particularly strong aversion to expressing support via phone: In an August 2020 Pew poll, just 32 percent of Democratic respondents via phone said they supported the death penalty, while 49 percent of online Democratic respondents did.<\/p>\n
If Pew had only reported its phone poll results last summer, it would have shown that support for capital punishment was down to 52 percent, more than 20 percentage points off its high in the 1990s. Instead, its online poll revealed that closer to two-thirds were in favor of it.<\/p>\n
There are a number of issues that make phone polls different from online surveys, including the fact that they tend to yield a slightly different sample of respondents. But Pew\u2019s researchers have taken this into account, and they\u2019re \u201cabsolutely\u201d convinced that so-called social desirability bias is the strongest factor driving mode differences here, said Courtney Kennedy, Pew\u2019s director of survey research.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a touchy subject, it\u2019s kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else \u2014 not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger,\u201d Kennedy said, referring to questions about the death penalty.<\/p>\n
Carroll Doherty, the director of political research at Pew, said that capital punishment was up there with immigration on the list of issues where response is most affected by survey mode.<\/p>\n
The stark differences among Democratic respondents indicate \u201cthat this is an issue on which they\u2019re kind of cross-pressured,\u201d Doherty said. \u201cYou see many Democrats saying the death penalty is morally justified in cases of murder, and on the other hand, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to have doubts about its implementation, especially whether there\u2019s racial bias.\u201d<\/p>\n
One thing that\u2019s consistent in Pew\u2019s research: Republicans tend to be far more supportive of capital punishment than Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are considerably more supportive than Black Americans, and less concerned about racial disparities.<\/p>\n
Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P., 77 percent said in the new poll that they supported the death penalty. And 80 percent called its use morally justified \u201cwhen someone commits a crime like murder.\u201d Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, just 46 percent favored the practice; 51 percent called it morally justified.<\/p>\n
Even among Republicans, however, there was broad acknowledgment that it\u2019s impossible to ensure innocent people won\u2019t be executed. Just 31 percent of Republicans and leaners said there were \u201cadequate safeguards\u201d to that effect. Only 12 percent of Democrats and their leaners said so.<\/p>\n
And most Americans \u2014 63 percent \u2014 doubted that the death penalty successfully discouraged crime. Even among those who favored its use, just 50 percent said it was a deterrent to serious crimes.<\/p>\n
At 63 percent, white Americans were far more likely to support the death penalty than Black Americans, who were evenly split. The inverse was true on the question of whether the death penalty is applied unfairly across race, something that studies consistently find to be true.<\/p>\n
Fully 85 percent of Black people said that whites were less likely to be put to death for similar crimes, but white respondents were evenly divided on the question.<\/p>\n