Aktuelle Publikationen

Objective
To explore the perceptions of the constraining and facilitating factors to patient-centered communication in clinical encounters of patients with type 2 diabetes and the providers involved in their care.

Data Sources/Study Setting
Patients (n = 12) and providers (n = 33) involved in diabetes care in northern Portugal.

Study Design
Seven focus groups.

Data Collection/Extraction Methods
Grounded theory, using open, axial, and selective coding.

Principal Findings
Patients focused on the patient-provider relationship, while providers emphasized the constraining factors when exchanging information and the facilitating factors regarding disease and treatment-related behavior. Patients and providers both agreed on some constraints (power imbalance, avoidance of criticism, disease minimization, use of jargon, and insufficient competencies and consistency among providers) and facilitators (seeing patients as persons, providing tailored information in plain language, and recognizing the “wake-up call”). Patients perceived an aggressive attitude as a barrier to communication, but providers perceived it as a facilitator. Patients included issues related to trust, respect, and psychosocial support as important factors to them. Only providers mentioned the influence of macro-level interventions and patients’ socioeconomic position as essential factors.

Conclusions
Improvements in patient-centered communication depend on fostering the patient-provider relationship, patients’ participation and involvement, and training providers’ communication skills.

We contribute to the extensive literature on international influences on democratization and democratic breakdowns by conceptualizing hegemonic mechanisms of regime change and assessing them empirically. Our findings are based on a multi-methods approach and highlight the varying importance of hegemonic influences in post-1945 Latin America. We argue that US support for democratization was consistent in the wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in 1978 and that it was decisive in many of these transitions. While past work has attributed responsibility to the US for the waves of democratic breakdowns from 1948 to 1956 and 1964 to 1976, an examination of the 27 breakdowns from 1945 to 2010 gives reason to doubt this interpretation. Future research could use these conceptual and methodological tools to explore the role of other powers in waves of democracy and authoritarianism.

Lehrkräfteverbände wurden bislang in Untersuchungen zur Schulpolitik als Akteure vernachlässigt. Der Vergleich der Schulpolitiken in Frankreich und Deutschland auf dem Feld output- und wettbewerbsorientierter Reformen zeigt, dass Verbände von Lehrkräften in der Politikgestaltung eine wichtige Rolle spielen. In Frankreich konnten Lehrkräfteverbände Vorhaben zur Stärkung interner und externer Evaluationen sowie Wettbewerbsmaßnahmen blockieren. In Deutschland blieb der Widerstand von Verbänden dagegen aus und der Fokus richtete sich eher auf Feinjustierungen der Maßnahmen. Der Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit die unterschiedlichen Umsetzungen auf Machtpositionen sowie Interessen und Strategien der Verbände von Lehrkräften zurückgeführt werden können.

Most measures of social conflict processes are derived from primary and secondary source reports. In many cases, reports are used to create event‐level data sets by aggregating information from multiple, and often conflicting, reports to single event observations. We argue that this pre‐aggregation is less innocuous than it seems, costing applied researchers opportunities for improved inference. First, researchers cannot evaluate the consequences of different methods of report aggregation. Second, aggregation discards report‐level information (i.e., variation across reports) that is useful in addressing measurement error inherent in event data. Therefore, we advocate that data should be supplied and analyzed at the report level. We demonstrate the consequences of using aggregated event data as a predictor or outcome variable, and how analysis can be improved using report‐level information directly. These gains are demonstrated with simulated‐data experiments and in the analysis of real‐world data, using the newly available Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD).

External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countries between 2001 and 2011. The study shows that in bad economic times, there is a compression of political representation: parties’ relationships with the societal groups they are closest to become less cooperative, while their relationships with the groups they are least close to become less conflictual.

The rising number of referendums on EU matters, such as the Brexit and the Catalonian independence votes, highlight the increasing importance of referendums as a problem‐solving mechanism in the EU. We argue that the Swiss case provides essential insights into understanding the dynamics behind referendums, which are often lacking when referendums are called for in the EU. Referendums in EU member states on EU matters differ substantially from those in the Swiss context. Nevertheless, proponents of more direct democratic decision‐making regularly cite the Swiss example. Our systematic analysis of why referendums are called, how they unfold and their effects in the EU and Switzerland reveals that the EU polity lacks the crucial conditions that embed direct democracy within the wider political and institutional system. The comparative perspective offers fundamental insights into the preconditions required for direct democracy to function and its limitations in the EU.

The collection of articles in this special issue provides a comprehensive analysis of European Union decision-making during the Eurozone crisis. We investigate national preference formation and interstate bargaining related to major reforms of the Economic and Monetary Union. The analyses rely on the new ‘EMU Positions’ dataset. This dataset includes information about the preferences and saliences of all 28 EU member states and key EU institutions, regarding 47 contested issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015. In this introductory article, we first articulate the motivation behind this special issue and outline its collective contribution. We then briefly summarise each article within this collection; the articles analyse agenda setting, preference formation, coalition building, bargaining dynamics, and bargaining success. Finally, we present and discuss the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset.