Who Sticks to the Death Penalty?

This work brings out several substantial points that contribute to the preceding literature on the death penalty. The previous pieces of research mainly concentrated on the methods of executions, the deterrent effect on crime rates, racial issues, yet, researchers failed to identify the core reason why countries choose to employ capital punishment. Since there is a scarcity of research in linking the death penalty to socio-demographic factors; this thesis attempts to fill this the gap in the scientific literature. Factors such as the share of Muslims in a country, education, GDP per capita, and “neighbor effect” were examined using a sample of 146 countries. The data were collected from a variety of sources and publicly available by their respective official websites: UIS Statistics, Death Penalty Worldwide, Our World in Data and Pew Research Center. As regards the Methodology, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analyses, density plots, probit models and marginals effects were examined. After evaluating all hypotheses, three out of four hypotheses showed significant results. The results show that social and demographic factors are strongly related to the existence of capital punishment in a country. For the future papers, it is recommended to broaden the scale of this issue and have a more in-depth look into the agents that propel death penalty use. All in all, this paper proposes that the death penalty status seems to vary according to different socio-demographic influencers.