As sup­port for the death penal­ty has waxed and waned over the years, the views of the major U.S. polit­i­cal par­ties, as reflect­ed in their nation­al con­ven­tion plat­forms, has changed. To track those changes, DPIC has cre­at­ed a new resource pre­sent­ing the Democratic and Republican par­ty plat­form posi­tions on crime and the death penal­ty from 1960 to 2016. With the most recent views of both the Republican and Democratic par­ties expressed in their 2016 plat­forms, the new page now reflects chang­ing views on the death penal­ty through­out the mod­ern era of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, as well as in the decade lead­ing up to the Supreme Court’s 1972 deci­sion in Furman v. Georgia strik­ing down death penal­ty laws across the coun­try. This year, the Republican par­ty plat­form ​“condemn[s]” the U.S. Supreme Court for what the plat­form calls the ​“ero­sion of the right of the peo­ple to enact cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” The draft of the Democratic par­ty con­ven­tion, expect­ed to be adopt­ed July 25, calls for abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty, which it says ​“has no place in the United States of America.” To pro­vide con­text for the chang­ing plat­forms, the page pro­vides pub­lic opin­ion data on the death penal­ty from Gallup polling since 1960, and opin­ion by par­ty affil­i­a­tion since Gallup first began pro­vid­ing that infor­ma­tion in 1988. Alongside that data, it includes an Index of Death Penalty Public Opinion devel­oped by Professor Frank Baumgartner at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (Click image to enlarge.) 

Neither par­ty specif­i­cal­ly ref­er­enced the death penal­ty from 1960 to 1972, until the Democrats, short­ly after the issuance of the Furman deci­sion, called for abo­li­tion. The first Republican plat­form in this peri­od to dis­cuss cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was in 1976, when it stat­ed, ​“Each state should have the pow­er to decide whether it wish­es to impose the death penal­ty for cer­tain crimes.” While the Republican par­ty has con­sis­tent­ly main­tained its sup­port for the death penal­ty, includ­ing a call for the rein­state­ment of the fed­er­al death penal­ty in 1988, the stance of the Democratic par­ty has var­ied. After leav­ing the death penal­ty out of its plat­form for 20 years, Democrats pro­mot­ed the expan­sion of the death penal­ty in 1996 and 2000, stat­ed it ​“must not be arbi­trary” in 2008 and 2012, and this year, as sup­port for the death penal­ty among Democrats at large con­tin­ued to fall, returned to its stance of 44 years ago, sup­port­ing the abo­li­tion of capital punishment.

(Posted by DPIC, July 22, 2016.) See Public Opinion.

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