Support for the Reinstatement of the Death Penalty as a Protest Attitude Against the Judiciary: The Role of Social Context

Whereas the dominant literature related to people’s attitudes toward the death penalty connect the variability of those attitudes with either fear of crime or fear/distrust toward the judicial system, we test our argument that high support for the death penalty and its reinstatement might reflect protest attitude against an untrustworthy judiciary, and more so when people state their attitudes toward the reinstatement of the death penalty than when they state their principled attitudes toward the death penalty. We frame this as a protest attitude. We replicate two sets of ordered probit models on data from a probability sample of 1414 respondents in Albania collected in 2015 via a cell phone random digit dialing technique (RDD). We found respondents’ support for the reinstatement of the death penalty reflects people’s lack of trust in the judiciary, but not necessarily them prioritizing fight against crime.