The role of ethnic divisions in people’s attitudes toward the death penalty: The case of the Albanians
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516644678 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| Author | Ridvan Peshkopia,D Stephen Voss |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2016, Vol. 18(5) 610–630
! The Author(s) 2016
The role of ethnic
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divisions in people’s
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516644678
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attitudes toward the
death penalty: The case
of the Albanians
Ridvan Peshkopia
University for Business and Technology, Kosove¨
D Stephen Voss
University of Kentucky, USA
Abstract
Are there specific ethnocultural features that make people support the death penalty, or
does support of capital punishment simply reflect people’s position vis-a`-vis power?
Much of the existing research on this topic has been developed in the absence of an
appropriate control group. However, this question can be answered only if ethnona-
tional culture remains constant across different political and socioeconomic settings. In
order to achieve such a goal, we focus our research on the Balkans where several social
settings fit such a research design; we chose ethnic Albanians as our ethnonational
culture of focus. We built a research design that would allow our key independent
variable, people’s position in country’s power structure, to vary across three countries:
Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. In each of these three countries, ethnic Albanians
are situated in different positions of the sociopolitical power structure, from the abso-
lutely dominant ethnic group in Albania proper; to an embattled ethnic minority in
Macedonia; to a tiny, compact, but peaceful ethnic minority in Montenegro. By analyzing
data collected via public opinion surveys, we conclude that, indeed, whether respond-
ents belong to a dominant ethnic group or an ethnic minority affects their attitudes
toward the death penalty.
Keywords
attitudes, death penalty, ethnic conflict, ethnic divisions, majority/minority status
Corresponding author:
Ridvan Peshkopia, University for Business and Technology, Kalabria, Prishtine¨ 10000, Kosove¨.
Email: ridvanpeshkopia@yahoo.com
Peshkopia and Voss
611
Introduction
The high support for the death penalty in Albania has been noticed by domestic
and foreign observers alike (Kru¨ger, 1999; Peshkopia, 2014; Peshkopia and Imami,
2008; Shqiptarja.com, 2013).1 Even though Albania abolished it in the 2000s,
support for capital punishment persists today. Major media outlets report heavily
on violent crime because it drives ratings and readers to them. Seeing so much of it
causes citizens, communities, and politicians to swing heavily in favor of the death
penalty. Hence the question: is there anything specific in the Albanian ethnona-
tional culture that makes Albanians especially attached to the sort of justice
suggested by capital punishment?
This question can be answered only if attitudes toward the capital punishment of
members of an increasingly homogenous ethnic Albanian population in Albania
are studied under conditions that would allow variance of the key variable across
different political and socioeconomic settings. We concur with claims from
Albanian politicians that concerns over violent crime drive the citizens of
Albania toward strong support for the death penalty, but argue that innate fears
associated with minority status of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro
make ethnic Albanians in these two countries strongly oppose the death penalty.
While attitudes toward the death penalty held by Albanians living in Albania can
be conventionally interpreted as either wanting retribution or else as an instrument
to deter criminals, attitudes toward the death penalty held by ethnic Albanians in
Macedonia and Montenegro are shaped by distrust over who implements justice.
Also, we control for a number of socioeconomic and demographic variables and
find, as we expect, that economic variables do not play any role in shaping people’s
perceptions about the death penalty; nor does education. We also control for three
demographic variables and find that what we call urban culture—whether someone
resides in countryside or city, hence whether one bears a more parochial or a more
cosmopolitan worldview—does not affect people’s positions over the death penalty.
Yet, as we expect, we find persisting gender and age gaps.
We built a research design that would allow our key independent variable to
vary across three countries: Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. In each of these
countries, ethnic Albanians are situated in different positions in the political
power structure, from the absolutely dominant ethnic group in Albania proper;
to an embattled ethnic minority in Macedonia in open confrontation with the
dominant Macedonian ethnic group; to a tiny, compact, but peaceful ethnic minor-
ity in Montenegro, who have allied with the embattled ethnic Montenegrins against
a large and assertive ethnic Serbian minority. We interviewed 1896 people in these
countries in a survey conducted in spring–summer 2009. All of these countries had
already abolished the death penalty in all circumstances years before the period of
our survey, so the question that reflects our dependent variable was a policy-
oriented query related to preferences about the reinstatement of the death penalty.
We refer to Hofstede’s (2011) definition of culture as ‘‘the collective program-
ming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of
people from others.’’ Hofstede et al.’s (2010) six dimensions measure aspects of
612
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a culture relative to other cultures. However, we find the two-dimensional Inglehart
and Welzel’s (World Values Survey, 2010) Cultural Map of the World (CMW) and
its visualization much more helpful and handy to use for our purpose. The CMW is
a scatter plot which positions each national culture according to a two-dimensional
coordinate system with survival versus self-expression values along the x-axis and
tradition versus modernity values along the y-axis. Both versions of the visualized
CMW maps, 1999–2004 and 2005–2008, show that the value differences between
societies around the world follow pronounced culture zone patterns. Fortunately,
the 1999–2004 version of the map includes all the three countries of our sample:
Albania (1.55, 0.4), Macedonia (1.15, 0.2), and Montenegro (1.2, 0.8).
This small area on a chart where the x-axis (survival values versus self-expression
values) spans from 2.25 to 2.25 and the y-axis (traditional values–secular rational
values) spans from 2.25 to 2.0 shows clearly that all of the countries in our sample
share very similar cultural values (Figure 1). Moreover, one can reasonably expect
that cultural values of the predominantly Albanian minorities in Macedonia and
Montenegro would gravitate closer to Albania’s cultural values along the Albania–
Macedonia and Albania–Montenegro triangle sides. All in all, the CMW increases
our confidence that cultural similarities among not only Albanians in Albania,
Macedonia and Montenegro, but also among Albanian, Macedonian, and
Montenegrin societies overwhelm their differences, hence our claim that ethnic
Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro could serve as control cases.
The impact of social divisions in people’s attitudes
toward the death penalty
The burgeoning literature on death penalty attitudes can be classified in two dis-
tinct groups: one that views these attitudes as built on fears and perceptions of
discrimination (Cochran and Chamlin, 2006; Halim and Stiles, 2001; Peffley and
Hurwitz, 2007), hence claiming a rationalist response to institutional settings where
people live (legal framework, justice system, position in the political system, etc.);
and another research body that builds either on prejudices (Barkan and Cohn,
1994; Borg, 1997; Gilliam and Iyengar, 2000; Peffley and Hurwitz, 2002), or
national traditions (Bohm, 1987, 1991, 1998; Lua and Zhang, 2005), thus tapping
on a culturalist approach. Much of this literature develops sophisticated statistical
analysis and brings interesting results. However, most of the work on this topic is
permeated by a research design shortcoming: the lack of an appropriate control
group. Such an absence inhibits us from having a more conclusive answer on the
role played in attitudes toward the death penalty by institutional setting, ethnona-
tional culture, or combinations thereof. Are these attitudes rational responses
toward a certain institutional setting or do they simply reflect ethnocultural
norms toward the issue?
For instance, when studying Indian students’ attitudes toward the death penalty,
Lambert et al. (2008) cannot be sure, in spite of respondents’ claims, about the role
of the institutional setting in creating perceptions about the death penalty; nor can
Peshkopia and Voss
613
Figure 1. The WVS cultural map of the world, 1999–2004.
they be sure about the role of Indian ethnonational subcultures in creating such
perceptions (see also Lambert et al., 2007). In this case, both the institutional
framework within which people rationally construe attitudes toward the death
penalty and the value framework that drives moral attitudes toward capital pun-
ishment are kept constant. Differently, when studying the difference in attitude
toward the death penalty along gender lines in the Republic of Georgia and
New York City, Kutateladze and Crossman (2009) allow for variance in both
ethnonational culture and institutional setting, thus making impossible any inde-
pendent assessment about causes of different perceptions that women and men
carry on death penalty. Such an approach hinders our understanding of whether
there is something inherent in the U.S....
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