Swedish rape offenders — a latent class analysis

Sweden has witnessed an increase in the rates of sexual crimes including rape.Knowledge of who the offenders of these crimes are is therefore of importance for ...     

Mental disorder is a cause of crime: The cornerstone of forensic psychiatry

The assumption that mental disorder is a cause of crime is the foundation of forensic psychiatry, but conceptual, epistemological, and empirical analyses show that neither mental nor crime, or the causation implied, are clear-cut concepts. “Mental” denotes heterogeneous aspects of a person such as inner experiences, cognitive abilities, and behaviour patterns described in a non-physical vocabulary. In psychology and psychiatry, mental describes law-bound, caused aspects of human functioning that are predictable and generalizable. Problems defined as mental disorders are end-points of dimensional inter-individual differences rather than natural categories. Deficits in cognitive faculties, such as attention, verbal understanding, impulse control, and reality assessment, may be susceptibility factors that relate to behaviours (such as crimes) by increasing the probability (risk) for a negative behaviour or constitute causes in the sense of INUS conditions (Insufficient but Non-redundant parts of Unnecessary but Sufficient conditions). Attributing causes to complex behaviours such as crimes is not an unbiased process, and mental disorders will attract disproportionate attention when it comes to explanations of behaviours that we wish to distance ourselves from. Only by rigorous interpretation of what psychiatry actually can inform us about, using empirical analyses of quantified aggressive antisocial behaviours and their possible explanatory factors, can we gain a clearer notion of the relationship between mental disorder and crime.     

Vom strategischen Nutzen des Wissens für die Politikberatung

In recent years, the field of political consulting and policy advice has gained growing attention and, thus, has been subject of important debates regarding its key concepts and theoretical foundations. This paper sets out to defend the authors' original thesis which has been challenged in the course of these debates. We argue that, along with classical oneway modes of consultation, a new way of interaction between political decision makers and consultants has emerged. The knowledge deriving from these cooperative discourses is not merely an external source for the preparation and legitimation of political decisions. It is integral part of the policy process and may unfold its potential as long as it meets the standards of epistemic and political robustness.     

Service quality and the optimum number of members in intermunicipal cooperation: The case of emergency primary care services in Norway

Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is often used as a mean to reap scale benefits. Most studies on the effects of IMC focus on cost savings, while service quality is overlooked. In this study, the focus is set on input quality in a service characterized by high asset specificity and need for redundancy: emergency primary care. We analyze how mode of governance affect performance by (1) measuring whether IMC versus single-municipal production affects input quality and (2) identifying optimum scale of operation; effect of the number of participants in the cooperation on input quality. The findings indicate that cooperation weakens the input quality of medical workforce, but that this negative effect is balanced out as the number of participants increases, indicating that cooperation needs to reach a certain size to achieve optimum scale of operation. Concerning equipment, both cooperation in general and an increasing number of participants decrease the input quality.     

Directed Patrol for Preventing City Centre Street Violence in Sweden — A Hot Spot Policing Intervention

This study examines a hot spot policing intervention where private security guards patrolled a specific area in the city centre of a mid-sized Swedish town during summer weekend evenings and nights, aiming to reduce the number of reported street violence incidents. A follow-up of the intervention, using previous years as a control was conducted to measure changes in the number of street violence rates before and during the intervention. The results show non-significant decreases in the number of reported street violence incidents during the intervention. The results can be interpreted in at least two ways: that the intervention had no effects; or that the small, but non-significant decreases observed, are indeed small effects that can be strengthened by modifying the implementation of the intervention. An additional analysis shows that the changes in crime rates are larger at times when the guards adapted a stricter hot spot policing approach, which indicates that with a more structured implementation of the intervention it might be possible to see larger effects.     

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.     

Questions of gender in a multicultural society

The relationship between multiculturalism and feminism has been hotly debated both theoretically and politically. This article approaches the issue through a critical assessment of Susan Moller Okins article, "Is multiculturalism bad for women?" (1999) and argues that some forms of feminist critique of multiculturalism run the risk of upholding and strengthening monoculturalism in its most excluding form. Norwegian integration politics are critically evaluated in light of this discussion.     

Merged municipalities, higher debt: on free-riding and the common pool problem in politics

This paper uses the Swedish municipal amalgamation reform of 1952 to study the common pool problem in politics. The amalgams were common pools and the municipalities had incentives to free-ride on their amalgam partners by increasing debt prior to amalgamation. We find that municipalities that merged in 1952 increased their debt between 1948 and 1952 when the reform could be anticipated. The increase amounted to 52% of new debt issued or 1.5% of total revenues in the merged municipalities. But contrary to the “law of 1/n”, free-riding did not increase in common pool size.