Coalition Building in the Anti-Death Penalty Movement uses the concepts of the political process model of social movements to analyze the factors that shape the racial face of the anti-death penalty movement. Contests are found to emerge over mobilizing and framing strategies as activists react to the political opportunity structure in a manner that privileges moral arguments above the racial ones that would allow them to build a more racially diverse constituency.

While a great deal of research has been done about many aspects of the death penalty, very little attention has been paid to the movement organized against it. Coalition Building in the Anti-Death Penalty Movement fills that gap with an empirical examination of the external and internal factors that shape the role race plays in the anti-death penalty movement. While the death rows across the U.S. are overwhelmingly filled with racial minorities and the poor, the ranks of the anti-death penalty movement are dominated by white, middle-class professionals. The attention given to race arise out of this racial distinction between death row inmates and the activists who advocate for them. By conducting interviews with white, black, and Latino anti-death penalty activists, this book examines the influence of race on the mobilization of activists and their approach toward abolition. The concepts of political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing provided by the political process model, are used to describe the complex manner in which moral opposition to the death penalty is shaped by the racial realities of the activists. Although racial tensions lie just below the surface, they nonetheless create real obstacles for the movement as it strives to build a racially diverse coalition of activists aimed at death penalty abolition.

Chapter 1 Political Process Theory and the Anti-Death Penalty
Chapter 2 Becoming Mobilized Against the Death Penalty
Chapter 3 Political Opportunities and Constraints on Activism
Chapter 4 Organizational Dynamics in the Movement
Chapter 5 Framing Opposition to the Death Penalty
Chapter 6 Future Directions