Who's afraid of forensic psychiatry?

Forensic psychiatry has come under mounting criticism from the press and other medical professionals, largely for its participation in the insanity defense. The author argues that the expertise available from the specialty is of increasing importance to psychiatry as a whole, as more and more legal issues become relevant to the practice of general psychiatry, and should be actively encouraged and legitimized rather than ostracized. All psychiatrists should be exposed to forensic principles and practices during their training, and the ability of forensic psychiatrists to serve as transducers between the clinical and the legal/judicial should be increasingly used to present the clinical viewpoint effectively in courts and legislatures.     

Organizations and Pluralist Democracy

The ideal conception of pluralist democracy can be seen as a schematic picture of actual conditions. On the local level - in the municipalities - there are a number of variants of pluralism. If local political systems can be assumed to be of varying character, it stands to reason that the roles of organizations in those sub-systems can also vary.
The following three general conclusions concerning the role of organizations in Swedish municipal politics are supported by our empirical findings:
(1) A heterogeneous pattern of values in a municipality promotes the development of an arrangement in which organizations predominantly assume the role of political opposition.
(2) The interaction between municipalities and organizations is a function of the pattern of local political values. The more heterogeneous this pattern, the more frequent are politically oriented contacts.
(3) Increased overlap of the social, the economic and the political arenas, and a more incrementalist decision-making structure in modern municipalities, creates greater incentives for the formation of organizations.
There should not be any doubt about the fact that the amalgamation reforms contributed to the creation of a more differentiated and multifaced structure of organizations. Hence, it could be said that the amalgamation reforms together with other structural factors are in the long run positively correlated with pluralism!
'Whatever progress may come in the future, anyone attempting today to give a systematic account of organizational behavior, especially of politically relevant behavior, cannot pretend he is offering a theory in any strict sense. At best, he can offer a theoretical perspective, a way of looking at organizations that directs attention persuasively to a few central processes that seem to explain (though not predict, in any scientific sense) a wide variety of phenomena.' (Wilson 1973. 13).     

Cognitive information levels,voter preferences,and local partisan political activity: A field experimental study on the effects of timing and order of message presentation

This article is based upon a factorial design field experiment conducted during the 1980 election campaign. The experiment was conducted to assess whether there is an optimal message strategy available to local party workers in their efforts to inform and persuade voters. The study assesses whether the timing of communications, i.e., near or distant to election day, and the order of message presentation, i.e., whether presenting important information early or late in a communication, have any effects upon voters' information levels and electoral decisions. The analysis supports an interpretation of recency effects, i.e., information presented last in a partisan appeal was more likely to facilitate information and persuasion effects than information positioned first. However, this finding was conditioned upon the timing of message presentation with appeals referencing familiar partisan material only effective near to election day and appeals referencing less familiar and nonpartisan material only effective further from election day.