Measuring State-Level Death Penalty Opinion: A Research Note

This study compares two approaches to estimating state-level death penalty opinion. One of these, survey pooling, is relatively simple, and the other, multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is considerably more involved. Using General Social Survey (GSS) geocoded data, we estimate state-level support for the death penalty using survey pooling and MRP. The estimates are then compared with available probability-based state-level polls. We find that the survey pooling estimates are generally closer to the state-level polls than are the MRP estimates. MRP consistently underestimate the level of death penalty support when compared to the state-level polls, but this is not the case with the survey pooling method. Researchers should carefully consider the data context and benchmark when choosing between these methods.