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 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…