Explaining Quality Management in the Danish and Swedish Public Health Sectors: Unintended Learning and Deliberate Co-Optation

This article examines the development of diverse quality systems in the otherwise quite similar Danish and Swedish public health sectors. After decades of numerous piecemeal medical and managerial quality development programs in both countries, a nationwide mandatory accreditation system was introduced in the Danish health services in 2009. Nationwide quality indicator projects are also found in Sweden, but there has been political attempt to introduce a compulsory system. This article seeks to explain this difference. It argues, first, that resistance from the medical professions blocked the introduction of compulsory, nationwide quality systems in both countries for decades. Second, the implementation of the Danish accreditation system was triggered by a combination of unintended policy learning produced by local reforms in two counties and of the Ministry of Health’s carefully orchestrated policy process that served to co-opt critical voices in the medical profession.     

Intergenerational Transmission of Work Values: A Meta-Analytic Review

Work values act as guiding principles for individuals’ work-related behavior. Economic self-sufficiency is an important predictor for psychological well-being in adulthood. Longitudinal research has demonstrated work values to be an important predictor of economic behavior, and consequently of self-sufficiency. Socialization theories designate parents an important role in the socialization of their children to cultural values. Yet, extant literature is limited in demonstrating the role families play on how youth develop agentic pathways and seek self-sufficiency in transition to adulthood. This study presents a meta-analytic review investigating the intergenerational transmission of work values, which is frequently assessed in terms of parent–child value similarities. Thirty studies from 11 countries (N?=?19,987; Median child age?=?18.15) were included in the analyses. The results revealed a significant effect of parents on their children’s work values. Both mothers’ and fathers’ work values, and their parenting behavior were significantly associated with their children’s work values. Yet, similarity of father–child work values decreased as child age increased. Our findings suggest a moderate effect, suggesting the influence of general socio-cultural context, such as generational differences and peer influences, in addition to those of parents on youth’s value acquisition. Our systematic review also revealed that, despite its theoretical and practical importance, social science literature is scarce in comprehensive and comparative empirical studies that investigate parent–child work value similarity. We discuss the implications of our findings for labor market and policy makers.     

Critical Election in the Wake of an Economic and Political Crisis: Realignment of Icelandic Party Voters?

A critical election is generally defined as one in which the decisive results of voting reveal a sharp alternation of pre‐existing cleavage(s) and voting patterns, and the dealignment or realignment made between parties is lasting. A critical election can be caused by various factors and in this article the authors analyse whether the global credit crunch in 2008 set things in motion in Iceland, resulting in the 2009 election as a critical election. In that election, the electoral relevance of voters’ psychological attachment to parties and of ideological distances to them weakened, whereas party competence perceptions increased in importance for vote choices. Attachment to parties and ideological distances are factors that are generally stable and change slowly over time, while party competence is influenced by which issues are of importance at the time of the election. This indicates that, in 2009, a restructuring of the determinants of the vote occurred; a pattern of changes that is typical for a critical election. Evidence is found that the importance of party sympathy increases again in the 2013 election, indicating a realignment, rather than a dealignment, occurring in the wake of the 2009 election.     

Do people want a ‘fairer’ electoral system? An experimental study in four countries

When judging how ‘fair’ voting rules are, a fundamental criterion used by both scholars and politicians is their ability or inability to produce proportional results – that is, the extent parties’ seat distribution after the elections accurately reflects their vote shares. How about citizens? Do citizens care about how proportional the outcome is? Or do they judge the outcome solely on the basis of how well (or poorly) their party performed? Taking advantage of a uniquely designed survey experiment, this article investigates the causal effect of proportionality on voter support for voting rules in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. The results show that proportionality drives support for the voting rules not above, but beyond party performance. There is little cross-country variation, which suggests that proportionality is appreciated in different contexts with little status quo bias. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the causal mechanisms linking electoral rules to voter support.     

Turkish Women Architects in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Era, 1908–1950

This article examines the public status and educational background of Turkish women architects from 1908 to 1950. Writings on the history of architecture in Turkey, as in the West, have focused on heroic male figures. Key works produced before the late 1970s used data gathered mainly from Arkitekt, the first Turkish architectural magazine, whilst a second generation of Turkish architectural historians has preferred to investigate state and private archives. It is impossible to find a mention of women as architects in either bodies of work, although their contributions are indeed evident in the pages of Arkitekt. This article aims to fill some of these gaps in the highly gendered history of modern Turkish architecture by identifying and examining women’s work as architects in Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. It also explores the relationship between the women’s liberation movement, the discipline of architecture, and modernization ideology associated with the Turkish Republic. It argues that women architects, who undertook important private commissions and were permitted to enter public competitions as anonymous entrants, did not encounter overt discrimination until the 1940s. Nevertheless, forms of indirect discrimination across the period served to silence women in the pages of the architectural press and to occlude them from key public commissions and offices.     

Whom Do They Recruit?: Profiling and Recruitment in the PKK/KCK

Terrorist organizations use a proactive strategy in identifying potential candidates for recruitment. In such a strategy, miscellaneous vulnerabilities, grievances, and feeling destitute, inter alia, render certain individuals perfect candidates for terrorist organizations. It is therefore crucial to have an integrative approach to understand the interplay between the profiles of terrorists and their reasons to join terrorist groups on the one hand and processes of recruitment on the other. Proceeding from such a fulcrum, this article provides a general profile of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]/Kurdistan Communities Union [KCK] members and various recruitment techniques used by this group. To this end, records of 2,270 group members were content analyzed, in addition to face-to-face interviews with 42 group members and a range of individuals from public and private institutions. Our findings suggest that a variety of individual and organizational factors influence individual paths toward terrorism.     

Determination of Coleoptera fauna on carcasses in Ankara province,Turkey

In this study, 40 species from Staphylinidae, Histeridae, Dermestidae, Silphidae, Nitidulidae and Cleridae families of Coleoptera which were found in 12 pig (Sus scrofa L.) carcasses were identified and recorded during a one-year period at the Hacettepe University Beytepe Campus located in Ankara, Turkey. According to the duration of their presence on the carcasses, 22 of these species were accepted to be important in decomposition. Their distribution over the months and the duration of their presence in the various decomposition stages over the seasons were determined.     

Media malaise or a virtuous circle? Exploring the causal relationships between news media exposure,political news attention and political interest

Being politically interested is one of the most important norms from a democratic perspective, as it is a crucial antecedent for voting, political knowledge, civic and political participation, and attentiveness to political information. However, only limited research has focused on the relationship between media use and political interest, despite the notion that modern politics is mediated politics. Even more important is the fact that the causal relationship between media use and political interest still has not been firmly established. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between news media use and political interest. The results show that there are indeed causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media. Overall these results lend stronger support to the perspective of media mobilisation theories than media malaise theories.