Testing the Politics of Presence: Women's Representation in the Swedish Riksdag

This article focuses on women's representation in the Swedish Riksdag. The theory of the politics of presence serves as a point of departure. The aim is to underpin empirically – or to test empirically – the assertion that female politicians, to a greater extent than male politicians, represent the interests of women. The concept of women's interests divides, on a theoretical level, into three components: the recognition of women as a social category; acknowledgement of the unequal balance of power between the sexes; and the occurrence of policies to increase the autonomy of female citizens. On the empirical level this corresponds to measurements indicating female versus male MPs' attitudes and behaviour in areas such as gender equality and social welfare policy. The data used are parliamentary survey studies from 1985, 1988, and 1994. The analysis controls for effects of politicians' gender when other factors – e.g. party affiliation, age, education, and parliamentary experience – are taken into account. The main result is that the theory of the politics of presence gains strong empirical support. What this study contributes is a significant measure of stability for the feminist critique of more established theories of representative democracy.     

Examining the Paradox of Crime Reporting: Are Disadvantaged Victims More Likely to Report to the Police?

This study uses an intersectional approach to examine the “paradox” that disadvantaged victims often mobilize the police, despite their distrust and lack of confidence in the law. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (1994–2016) were analyzed using logistic regression to model the predicted probabilities of police notification by victims of crime. Economic disadvantage, as measured by family poverty and lack of a high school education, increased the probability that females reported their victimization to the police, but decreased the likelihood that males did so. Economically disadvantaged black females had the highest probability of reporting, while economically disadvantaged black and Hispanic males had the lowest. Examining the intersectional differences across social groups shows that reporting behavior is not just a function of one attribute but rather is a function of multiple identities and structural inequalities.     

Hate,Threats, and Violence. A Register Study of Persons Suspected of Hate Crime

This article focuses on individuals suspected of hate crimes with xenophobic, Islamophobic, and homophobic motives. The objective is to fill a gap in the knowledge left by existing research, which has primarily focused on victims and definitional problems. This article's genuine contribution to new research is the comparative perspective and the study of co-offending and specialization in offences for persons suspected for hate crimes. To find persons suspected for hate crimes, register data relating to hate-crime-motivated assault and unlawful threats/molestation offences from 2006 have been used. The study is based on a total of 1,910 offence reports together with information from the Registers of Suspected and Convicted Offenders for 558 persons suspected for hate crimes. Xenophobic hate crimes are over-represented in the material by comparison with homophobic and Islamophobic hate crimes. In the reports that have information about the relation between victim and perpetrators, it is more common for the perpetrators to be known than unknown to the victims. In cases where a suspected person has been identified, males are in a clear majority. Those suspected of homophobic hate crimes have the lowest mean age. Only a small number of offence reports include information on suspected co-offenders. Fifty-five per cent of the suspected people have prior registered convictions. It is very uncommon for them to be specialized in violent offences or unlawful threats/molestation, however. It is not possible to generalize the results to perpetrators of hate crimes, because 70% of the offence reports did not have information of suspected persons.     

The pluralization of policing and the rise of private policing in China

Policing in China has undergone tremendous change during the economic transformation of the past three decades. This paper describes the plural policing bodies that have existed during pre- and post-reform periods in China. In the pre-reform period the policing bodies were generally public in nature with the public security police playing an important role in providing professional guidance to the other policing bodies. In the post-reform period, there has been a transition from a monopoly of public policing to an integration of public/private policing, with the public security police still playing a leading role in the policing network. Apart from the emergence of private policing (the security service industry), there is also a trend towards privatizing some previously public policing bodies in line with the movement toward strengthening the rule of law and towards privatization in general.     

Business Value in Public-Private Partnerships: The Positive Impact of Trust and Task-Relevant Competencies on Business Outcomes in PPPs

ABSTRACT

Governments and businesses enter public-private partnerships (PPPs) to achieve better outcomes, but successful partnerships are not easily accomplished. Because businesses’ expectations about PPP outcomes affect how and whether they participate as partners, managing PPPs effectively requires knowing not just what governments lose or gain, but also the value businesses receive. This article demonstrates how structural, collaborative, and participant factors associated with both public and private partners affect business value in PPPs. Based on a mixed-methods approach, this study tests four hypotheses on how PPPs influence value creation for businesses. The findings show that PPP experience, trust, and size have significant effects on business value. However, they only increase certain types of value, depending on the presence and performance of other factors. Moreover, the results show that businesses gain more intangible values, such as network development and knowledge, than revenue.     

Testing the Impact of Political Generations: The Class of 94 and Pro‐feminist Ideas in the Swedish Riksdag

How can one explain the transformation of elected assemblies like national parliaments? In this study it is argued that much can be gained from taking the assumption of political generations more seriously when trying to explain transformations of the political agenda – for example, of themes and topics brought up in the parliamentary process. More specifically, the article expands on previous research in three ways: first, it launches the concept of ‘parliamentary political generation’ where the core element is the combination of an influx of large numbers of newcomers into the elected assembly and an electoral context that is formative – that is, that exhibits characteristics that distinguish the election from other elections. Second, an empirical test is conducted where other factors such as party affiliation and social background characteristics are controlled for. Finally, the test on the impact of parliamentary political generations is conducted in a context – the Swedish Riksdag – where parliamentary party groups are strong. The data used is the Parliamentary Surveys 1985–2010 conducted at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The political generation in focus is the ‘Class of 94’. The results show that the Class of 94 distinguish themselves by being more feminist than their senior colleagues and other groups of newcomers in Swedish elections. This is the feminist generation in Swedish politics.     

Differentiating cause-of-death terminology for deaths coded as sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation, and unknown cause: an investigation using US death certificates, 2003-2004

We compared written text on infant death certificates for deaths coded as sudden infant death syndrome (R95), unknown cause (R99), and accidental suffocation (W75). Using US mortality files supplemented with the death certifiers' written text for all infant deaths with International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 assigned codes R95, R99, and W75, we formed cause-of-death subcategories from common themes identified from the written text. Among all infant deaths in 2003-2004, the underlying cause of death was listed as R99 for 2128 deaths, R95 for 4408 deaths, and W75 for 931 deaths. Among the postneonatal deaths, the differences in subcategories varied between assigned ICD-10 codes: for R99-coded deaths, 45.8% were categorized as "Unknown" and 48.6% as "Pending"; for R95-coded deaths, 67.7% were categorized as "sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)"; and for W75-coded deaths, 76.4% were categorized as "Suffocation." Examination of the written text on the death certificates demonstrates variability in the assigned ICD-10 codes which could have an important effect on the estimates of SIDS cases in the United States.