Security, Equality, and the Clash of Ideas: Sweden's Evolving Anti-Trafficking Policy

Seeking to explain the emergence of anti-trafficking initiatives, scholars have explored two sets of ideas??national security and gender equality??thought to shape policy. In this study, we examine whether such ideational influence accounts for Sweden's evolving anti-trafficking policy over the past decade. As powerful domestic ideas about gender inequality informed the adoption of an abolitionist prostitution policy in the 1990s, one would expect similar ideas to influence domestic responses to the related issue of cross-border trafficking. However, our case study shows that the policy area of trafficking has largely followed a different ideational path. Gendered ideas, periodically nested in a human rights discourse, have been salient in the public debate on trafficking in human beings, especially during the campaign to boycott the 2006 FIFA World Cup. However, they have exerted substantially less influence on Swedish legislative initiatives to combat trafficking, with security concerns still holding sway.     

Power Sharing: Institutions,Behavior, and Peace

Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we compare the direct effect of formal power‐sharing institutions on peace with their indirect effect through power‐sharing behavior. Combining data on inclusive and territorially dispersive institutions with information on power‐sharing behavior, we empirically assess this relationship on a global scale. Our causal mediation analysis reveals that formal power‐sharing institutions affect the probability of ethnic conflict onset mostly through power‐sharing behavior that these institutions induce.     

Do campaign strategies and tactics matter? Exploring party elite perceptions of what matters when explaining election outcomes

In research on political campaign communication, it is often assumed that campaign strategies and tactics are highly important for explaining election outcomes. In contrast, most research in political science tends to emphasize the importance of political substance, long‐term factors such as party identification, and real‐world conditions for explaining election outcomes. Although political parties in practice treat election campaigns as highly important and consequential, there is virtually no research on how party elites perceive the importance of campaign strategies and tactics when explaining election outcomes. Hence, drawing on a survey among Swedish members of parliament, this study investigates party elite perceptions of what matters when people decide which party to vote for and of what matters when explaining election outcomes. In brief, the results show that members of parliament perceive campaign strategies and tactics as significantly less important than the substance of politics. In the concluding analysis, the implications of the results are analyzed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detecting Deception Via Strategic Disclosure of Evidence

Deception detection research has largely neglected an important aspect of many investigations, namely that there often exists evidence against a suspect. This study examined the potentials of timing of evidence disclosure as a deception detection tool. The main prediction was that observers (N = 116) would obtain higher accuracy rates if the evidence against the suspects (N = 58) was presented in a late rather than early stage of the interrogation. This prediction was based on the idea that late evidence disclosure would trigger lack of consistencies between the liars’ stories and the evidence; this could be used as a cue to deception. The main prediction received support. Late disclosure observers obtained an overall accuracy of 61.7%, compared to 42.9% of Early disclosure observers. Deceptive statements were identified with high accuracy (67.6%) in Late disclosure, indicating that the technique in this form is beneficial mainly for pinpointing lies.     

The odontological identification of Eva Braun Hitler

On May 7th-9th, 1945, a team of Russian pathologists autopsied several bodies found in and near the Fuehrer Bunker in Berlin; among them, a female body (No. 13) was later identified as that of Eva Braun Hitler (EBH), mainly by means of a gold bridge from the lower right jaw. A postmortem photograph of this bridge also shows a separate gold filling. Data now available on the dental treatment of EBH have permitted the present authors to substantiate that this gold filling also came from the mouth of EBH. Further speculation about the fate of EBH would henceforth seem professionally unfounded.     

Shifting Dimensions of Citizen Control1

European politics is still dominated by representative and parliamentary national systems of policy making. These systems can be seen as chains of political delegation from citizens through parliamentarians and executive office holders to civil servants. In these chains, a major trend for the past thirty years, and more strongly during the second half of that period, is a strengthening of agents' accountability to the principals. But, simultaneously, citizens' ability to exercise accountability through parliamentary democracy is eroding because of a decline in political party cohesion. Concurrently, constraints external to both the constitutional chain and political parties are growing stronger.
The changes along these three dimensions lead to a situation in which democratic principals commonly decide more about less. Thus, while reforms have strengthened the constitutional parliamentary chain of governance, there is also an ongoing de-parliamentarisation of modern politics. The main motivation for this special issue is to investigate this general phenomenon through a set of focused case studies of the Nordic (here known as 'Scandinavian') countries. These analyses show important differences in how these trends have been manifest. In one country, Finland, the parliamentary chain has actually grown in strength and importance in the last decade.     

How to make perpetrators in denial disclose more information about their crimes

This study examined interview techniques for eliciting admissions from perpetrators of a crime. Two techniques derived from the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) framework (SUE-Confrontation and SUE-Confrontation/Explain) were compared to an Early Disclosure of Evidence technique. Participants (N?=?75) performed a mock criminal task divided into three phases before being interviewed. In the SUE conditions, statement-evidence inconsistencies were obtained by strategic interviewing for Phases 1 and 2. For both SUE conditions, the interviewer confronted the suspects with these inconsistencies, emphasising that withholding information undermined their credibility. For the SUE-Confrontation/Explain condition, the suspects were asked to explain each inconsistency. To restore their credibility, the suspects in the SUE conditions were expected to become more forthcoming in Phase 3 (the phase which lacked information). The suspects in the SUE-Confrontation condition (vs. the suspects in the Early Disclosure condition) disclosed more admissions about Phase 3. As predicted, the suspects in the SUE conditions perceived the interviewer to have had comparatively more information about Phase 3. The suspects in the SUE-Confrontation/Explain condition strived to maintain their credibility either by fitting their story to the evidence or by sticking to the initial story. The study shows that the SUE technique is effective for eliciting admissions.     

Introduction: Parliamentary democracy and the chain of delegation

European Journal of Political Research -     

Training Police Investigators to Interview to Detect False Intentions

This study is the first to investigate police investigators’ adherence to, and the effectiveness of, a training program for detecting true and false intentions. Experienced police investigators (N = 53) were either trained or not trained in how to interview to discriminate between true and false intentions. All investigators interviewed mock suspects (N = 53), of which half lied and half told truth about their intentions. Both subjective and objective measures showed that the trained investigators interviewed in line with the training received. That is, a large proportion asked about the planning of the stated intentions. Noteworthy, none of untrained investigators reported to have posed such questions for strategic purposes. The trained investigators reached a higher detection accuracy level (65 %) than their untrained colleagues (55 %), however not significantly. Given that the investigators adhered to the training, this training package is a viable starting point for developing more effective training programs.     

The Estonian way of deinstitutionalisation. Experiences from an ethnographic research in SOS Children’s Village

This study provides insight into change processes of child residential care as depicted by ethnographic research on Estonian SOS Children’s Villages (SOS CV). Through the analysis of daily life in substitute homes, this study aimed to gain an in-depth and contextualised understanding of this deinstitutionalisation process. The changing approach of SOS CVs from institutional village-life-based to community-based approaches where nonbiological children are raised is discussed. The interpretation of said changes as deinstitutionalisation and their complicated nature is outlined. The latter is attributed to the divergent effects of activities. The findings ultimately lead to the conclusion that such change processes result in both challenges and difficulties to the Estonian substitute care system.