Social constructivist theorists have sought to explain how international norms proliferate from democratic to democratising countries. The contributors of this literature claim that this entire process is based on efforts to change leaders' beliefs, thus shifting the process from simply elite compliance to state socialisation. Yet, elite socialisation might not mean state socialisation unless democratising countries' societies at large appropriate the international norms. We argue that we cannot have state socialisation with an international norm unless the majority of the most important political and societal actors consciously embrace and appropriate that norm. Different from what has been argued so far, elite compliance might not lead at all to state socialisation, and norm institutionalisation might not represent norm appropriation. The case of the abolition of the death penalty offers an example of a process conducted only by the elites, who purposely avoid public debates on that issue. We argue that, rather than negligence, avoiding public debates on the abolition of the death penalty in Eastern European countries shows either a fear of elites to engage the generally anti-abolitionist public in that debate or an escape from a debate over a norm to which leaders themselves do not subscribe.

Are there specific ethnocultural features that make people support the death penalty, or does support of capital punishment simply reflect people's position vis-à-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 ethnonational 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 absolutely 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 respondents belong to a dominant ethnic group or an ethnic minority affects their attitudes toward the death penalty.

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We argue that support for the reinstatement of capital punishment might reflect protest against an untrustworthy judicial system, framing this as a protest attitude. We test our argument with data from a probability sample of 2,366 respondents in Albania collected in 2015 via a cell phone random digit dialing technique. We found that respondents’ support for the reinstatement of the death penalty is associated with lack of trust in the country’s judiciary but not necessarily respondents prioritizing the war on crime. Also, we found that skepticism toward European Union (EU) membership conditionality as a drive for the country’s democratization is a good predictor of support for the reinstatement of the death penalty, but there is no evidence that respondents related their support for the country’s EU membership with support for capital punishment.