Political, Religious Beliefs Limit Education’s Impact on Death Penalty Support

Newswise — Previous research has shown that higher education dampens support for capital punishment, but University of Nebraska scholars have discovered those collegiate effects are lessened among conservatives.

A pair of new analyses by Philip Schwadel and Amy Anderson show that college-educated Americans are still far less likely than non-college educated Americans to support the death penalty, but that the effect of higher education is attenuated — and in some cases nonexistent — among both political and religious white conservatives.

Schwadel, Happold Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Anderson, professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, used data from the nationally-representative General Social Surveys to examine both religiously conservative and politically conservative Americans in their studies, published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice and Sociology of Religion. 

Schwadel said the results among the religiously and politically conservative groups were very similar in that right-leaning individuals were more steadfast in their attitudes toward capital punishment, and support remained high even with a college degree. In contrast, among political moderates/liberals, the religiously unaffiliated, and Catholics, higher education is strongly associated with reduced support for capital punishment.

The studies are a continuation of Schwadel and Anderson’s previous work looking at the demographics of Americans who support the death penalty, which found that age and education play a role, and they wanted to know if education was a factor regardless of political and religious beliefs. 

“Is this impact of education applying to everyone? And what we found is that it doesn’t really apply to either religious or political conservatives — or it applies a lot less,” Schwadel said. “We see that religious conservative ideals and politically conservative ideals are both strongly supportive of punitiveness, so it made sense to us that education wouldn’t have that impact on them.”

In contrast to white Americans, non-white Americans’ levels of higher education were unrelated to views on capital punishment, and the effects of political orientation and religion were smaller.

“Among white respondents, the highly educated tend to be less punitive, though this association is considerably reduced for conservative whites” Schwadel said. “We don’t see the same patterns in the analyses encompassing all non-white respondents. While we cannot make distinctions among non-whites due to data limitations, this does align with some of the research on the African American community that suggests that more highly educated African Americans may be more punitive in certain cases.”

Support for capital punishment in the United States has remained steady over the last decade with a little over half of Americans in favor (55%), but support has declined precipitously since the 1990s when upwards of 80% said they supported the death penalty. The partisan divide over capital punishment has also widened with 77% of Republicans in support, in contrast to only 35% of Democrats, according to Gallup 2024 surveys.

The results of the studies examining politically and religiously conservative Americans were very similar likely because of the more robust intersection of politics and religion over the last three or four decades. Schwadel, a researcher of religiosity in the United States, said there has been a shift in how a person’s politics and religion interact. 

“In the 1990s or early 2000s, it was religion influencing politics, but more recently, we’re finding that politics influences religion — that some people’s religious beliefs and even their religious identity is influenced by their politics,” Schwadel said. “I think that plays a role in explaining why conservative politics seems to be potentially supplanting conservative religion in terms of mediating the effect of education.”

There is a lot of positive and negative discourse about how higher education impacts a person’s ideological and religious beliefs, Schwadel said, and some might not be based in fact.

“I think it’s important that we understand that some of that discourse might be over-emphasizing the impact of college on people’s attitudes,” he said.