Guilty as framed

“Er, the first link is just back to Crooked Timber.

Well, it does go “here”, and there is “more” here, so I guess it’s literally true . . . .

Anyway . . . well, it would be interesting to see responses to a question about how some people think it’s unfair because most of the people executed are poor, or something along those lines – y’know, is support increasing because of general antipathy to disadvantaged groups/ groups seen to have high crime rates, etc. –
but honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect would be smaller/nonexistent, and that there’s just a certain percentage of people who want the state to do their lynching for them (or whatever).
Bleh.

Actually, I semi-retract that. I’m not sure if the difference between question wording is significant or not. Apparently the difference between the “% favor” numbers isn’t, but the delta itself is. I don’t get that. Maybe somebody can educate me.

However, the N is still pretty small. I’d take this with a grain of salt.

I guess what I meant to say was:

Do white people have something against black people? I hate to say it but that explains ALOT.

The first statement in the second question is one which many interviewees would find problematic.

I don’t agree that any law can be judged as unfair solely because it’s applied mainly to a particular group.

You could expect a statement like that to destabilise the respondent. Perhaps this might be an alternate explanation, or partial explanation, for the result.

If you had as the frame question “Some people say people on death row are actually just mentally ill people with a bad childhood who need a hug. Do you favor the death penalty?” the number in favor would be even higher.

[aeiou] Click on my name for a report on the racial demographics of murder and murderers. It seems the way the question is framed is indeed misleading; Blacks are not executed disproportionately, they’re committing murder disproportionately. This is fairly widely known, perhaps poll respondents are reacting adversely to being fed a misleading question.

“The way the question is framed is indeed misleading; Blacks are not executed disproportionately”

Is that how the question is framed?

One thing I have noticed, and that may correlate well with this survey’s results, is a white backlash to racial appeals.

That is, given a frame that suggests that whites in general may have racist attitudes, and that racist attitudes would cause action X, many whites in my experience tend to react in a way verbalized as “Fuck you for calling me a racist, I’m going to do X now.”

Yeah, i don’t see anything to disagree with in the paper. I just thought how you or John sides wrote the post was misleading/simplistic.

When Justice Blackmun wrote “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death”, he may have been as frustrated with its inability to cull white malefactors as with its efficiency in killing blacks.

What would people say if #2 had been:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are men. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

notsneaky I don’t know if that is true or not but I remember an excellent example from recent history – that 17 year old black chap who got a consensual blow job from a 15 year old. The jury were presented with a crime he had clearly committed, but didn’t realise he was going to get some shocking punishment for it. Isn’t this the issue with the Jena 6 as well, that they are being charged with a ludicrously overserious crime? I will match your completely hazy recollection with those…

Also in Australia the high rate of Aboriginal death in prison is not actually due to higher death risk but due to extremely high rates of incarceration for minor misdemeanours (we even coined a phrase for the brace of charges, “the trifecta”).

In contradiction to your opinion though, I recall that the issue is a common example in introductory regression text books, and always ends up showing a huge bias once one adjusts for a confounder (either jury race or victim race, I can’t recall). So it could just be that you are wrong…

Henry, you’re an ass, but I knew that already. You might have made it clear that you meant one comment per day site-wide, rather than per thread, before disemvolwing a comment which merely linked to what would appear relevant evidence, and said nothing particularly controversial.

The echo chamber here is getting smaller every day, people, with Henry at the controls.

And Brett lies again. Unless there are a bunch of other people being banned.

Katherine: “I find it simply fascinating that a large proportion of the first round of comments were of the “no it simply can’t be racism (although I haven’t read the report)” variety. I genuinely mean no negative comment on those particular individuals, but it really is just fascinating how gut reactions will tend to (want to) deny racism in average white responses.”

Katherine, it is amazing, isn’t it? And yet, when discussing racism as a major factor in differing behavior by race, the same people will deny it. Moreso, people who don’t have that reaction will observe that reaction in numerous others, and still not see just how racist they are.

There was an objective measure of racism in the 2000 Alabama election. The Alabama constitution had an anti-miscegenation article. It hasn’t been enforced for a long time, and there was a movement to repeal it. Probably the first evidence was the fact that the legislature didn’t dare do it themselves, but referred it to the people for a vote (though that may just be a peculiarity of Alabama law). In any case, the referendum passed something like 58-42.

The belief that interracial marriage should be illegal is a classically racist belief, so we can say that 42% of Alabamans are unmistakably racist. It shouldn’t be hard to to a comparison of distribution of Republican votes and votes on the measure in question. (The referendum was voted on in a by-election, not the main election, and it’s possible that if turnout had been greater the referendum would have lost.)

So anyway, there is a lot of pure old-fashioned racism out there.

It’s pretty depressing that 66% of respondents think the death penalty is a good idea, period.

I’d be interested in response to the following question:

Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because some people are executed for crimes they didn’t commit. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

Probably the first evidence was the fact that the legislature didn’t dare do it themselves, but referred it to the people for a vote (though that may just be a peculiarity of Alabama law).

According to Wikipedia constitutional amendments in Alabama must go to statewide vote unless they are approved unanimously by the legislature. Which I suppose means that there was a vote against.

“active Vote No campaign”

39: Who, Brett?

The wonders of Google: there’s a paper entitled “Measuring the difference between white voting and polling on interracial marriage” to be found at http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Cgqz9UYTuf4J:www.hmdc.harvard.edu/micah_altman/papers/MeasuringRacialDiffs.pdf+2000+alabama+%22election+results%22+miscegenation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us that offers some details about the background to the 2000 referendum in Alabama (and the 1998 vote in South Carolina). There was no significant opposition to the repeal in the Legislature (where it passed unanimously) or in the media; there was no organized opposition to it other than “the 200-member Alabama branch of the Southern Party.” Nonetheless, relying on precinct results as a basis for projecting the race of voters, the authors estimate that 49% [49-59%] of white voters, versus 8% [8-11%] of black voters voted against repeal. Similar results in South Carolina. This contrasted with 61% of potential white Alabama voters who said they would vote for repeal — what we call the “Tom Bradley effect” here in California. Which tells us something else about polls, regardless of the methodological problems that this study about the death penalty might have.

A lot of the responses are highly sensitive to what the answerer perceives as the validity of the framing. For example imagine a question framed: “Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because alien ghosts were exiled from another planet and have corrupted our communal energy. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” Here the frame clearly cuts against the later test question. By pairing them together and offering the explanation as ‘related’, you make the second question look bad. People accept neither the factual claim (that alien ghosts were exiled from another planet and have corrupted our communal energy) nor the linkage (that the idea expressed about alien ghosts has anything to do with the death penalty). You get in the habit of saying “that’s ridiculous” and by the third time you are somewhat more predisposed to say that the thing as a whole is ridiculous—(you analyze it as a whole rather than as individual parts). This is why good interrogators ask lots of questions that the prisoner will agree with at the beginning.

Step to the innocent framing. Here I suspect that most people would accept the linkage, but they don’t accept the ‘some’ as being a statistically significant number which should change the argument. ‘Some’ people get struck by lightening, but we don’t worry about it much. This may be an incorrect view of the underlying factual issue, but I suspect it is the actual view.

Back to the original questions, I suspect that a few people don’t accept the facts, but that most people don’t accept the linkage. So while not as strongly as the alien ghosts example, they are still predisposed to reject the later proposition.

Note that the hardening of positions comes across at all levels. The number who strongly support the death penalty goes up, and the number who somewhat support it remains essentially steady. Unless people are jumping from “undecided” straight to “strongly support”, this is a hardening of position across levels.

Interestingly enough, this same shift is observed even among those who oppose the death penalty. The number who strongly oppose and who somewhat oppose drops noticeably in response to the racially charged question. This is an interesting result (though it also makes me wonder if the ‘other randomly selected group of white people’ was just straight up not as opposed to the death penalty). There are all sorts of potential explanations for that (racism, the framing I’ve discussed, drawing an odd group) but the result of the hardening in the anti-death penalty group is worth thinking about more.

Also we can look at the black respondents in the same analysis. I would suspect that they are much more likely to accept the validity of the fact presented and the linkage between the fact and the later question. Another very interesting result is that the black respondents react even more negatively to the innocent framing than the racial framing. I suspect that this result is because they strongly accept the linkage between the factoid and the later question in the innocent framing.

Anyway, no conclusions from me on the topic. I’m perfectly willing to accept, sadly, that many of those who seem to have a stronger position on the topic, really are racist. But on the other hand I hate when the interpretation intended by the interviewer is taken as gospel—the effect of people getting in a habit of disagreeing or agreeing in a particular interview really does exist.

Is this true?

Apparently not. While African-Americans have been disproportionately represented among the executed, whites have been a numerical majority.

Uncle Kvetch: Do you know if it is still disproportional if normalized by income? Or by other socio-economic proxies?

This elegant study manages to demonstrate that the Southern strategy is the American strategy — Republicans can push *anything* as long as they can suggest it punishes, or at least snatches any benefits from, blacks.

Again, and I don’t particularly care that it’s going to get me reamed for pointing this out, African Americans are not disproportionately executed. They’re disproportionately committing murder. If anything, African-Americans are under-represented on death row relative to the share of murders they commit. (Check out figure 3 on page 25.)

If there’s any disproportion, it’s in how often the death penalty is levied relative to the race of the victim. Which may very well be a result of racism, but may alternately be a consequence of African-Americans being hostile to the death penalty, and comprising most of the jury pool in areas where most of the black on black murders are taking place. It could be challenging to disentangle these effects, as it would require a detailed inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding each of the cases.