Contacts with public services, with special reference to mental health care, preceding a serious crime: a retrospective study of 268 subjects of forensic psychiatric investigations

Between July 1995 and June 1996, 533 subjects underwent forensic psychiatric investigation I Sweden. Odd case numbers (n = 268) were included in the study. Of these 268 people, 50% had been in contact with psychiatric services during the six-month period preceding the crime leading to forensic psychiatric assessment. Contacts with psychiatric services during the six-month period preceding the crime were significantly more common in three categories of individuals than others. These were: women, individuals who were diagnosed as having a psychotic disorder during the forensic psychiatric investigation, and individuals found to suffer from a serious mental disorder as defined in the legislation. Subjects who were found not to suffer from a serious mental disorder and were thus not eligible for special sanctions on medicolegal grounds had significantly less psychiatric contacts before the crime, as did subjects under 20 years of age. However, these two groups still had considerably more psychiatric contacts than the general population. The present results suggest that the patient category studied requires special monitoring and case management in general psychiatry in Sweden. To this end, we call for closer studies of high-risk individuals, particularly of previously violent offenders and potentially violent offenders, and closer studies of their psychiatric contacts. This will provide a basis for the development of adequate programs and guidelines for effective care and treatment within the psychiatric sector.     

“Getting off the Tiger”: The Spanish Transitional Model and its Influence on the Democratic Transitions in Argentina and Chile, 1977–1990

The article explains how the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy, as a “model” for a political reform devoid of transitional justice, informed the Argentine and Chilean democratic transition of the 1980s. It indicates that during the mid-1980s, Spanish figures promoted Spain’s “pacted transition” in Latin America within particular intellectual networks. While ultimately failing to impact the Argentine democratisation, the Spanish discourse of “consensus” made a more salient impact in Chile during the late 1980s. The goal of this article is ultimately to suggest that while Chilean reformers designed their transitional model building on both the Spanish and Argentine precedents, their discourse bore a strong consistency with the core principles of the Spanish political reform, a fact that should be attributed to a decade of Chilean-Spanish dialogue.     

Citizens and Resource Allocation: Improving Decision Making with Interactive Web-Based Citizen Participation

Collective consumption and benefit characterize many government services. Moreover, government services are mostly paid for collectively through taxes—there is little or no relationship between the taxes paid by a household and its use of a particular service. Public sector decision makers face complex budget problems with difficult solutions. Involving citizens meaningfully in these decisions has long been a conundrum. The authors teamed up with the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to develop a Web-based survey to overcome some of these participation problems and help decision makers better understand citizen preferences. The Web survey allowed for real-time interactivity and was tailored to present respondents with trade-offs between service levels and taxes.     

Priming,Issue Ownership,and Party Support: The Electoral Gains of an Issue-Friendly Media Agenda

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns.” We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties, while government parties, always struggling with the electoral cost of ruling, lose votes when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is “issue-friendly.”