The purpose of this study is to ? through a discourse analysis ? examine how the parliamentary committee ? Ansvarskommittén ? legitimizes the need for merging administrative regions. The committee?s investigation is what underlies the present debate on regionalisation and the merging of regions in Sweden. To carry out this discourse analysis, I have used ?What?s the problem represented to be??, by Carol Lee Bacchi as an analytical framework.

Denna fallstudie behandlar USA:s negativa ställningstagande till Kyoto-protokollet. Syftet är att utreda och analysera vilka olika faktorer som kan tänkas ha legat till grund för den ändrade inställning som landet intog efter att George W. Bush hade tillträtt som president 2001. Både systemfaktorer och inrikespolitiska faktorer tas i beaktande och hela studien tar George W. Bushs person som utgångspunkt.

This thesis consists of three parts: one normative, one empirical and one constructive, with the intention to explore the enforcement of accountability in megaprojects.The thesis aims to evaluate the level of accountability in the policy process of the European Spallation Source, ESS between 1990 and 2008. In order to make a comparison possible, a norm is created concerning how a policy process should be designed, with primary focus on openness and participation, to make enforcement of accountability possible. The policy process of the ESS is compared with this norm with the purpose of discovering whether the process contains elements that assure enforcement of accountability. After the comparison is done, it is possible to formulate constructive proposals about how the enforcement of accountability can be improved.The thesis also explores how networks, consisting of actors with particular resources, surrounding the ESS-project affects the form of the policy process, e.g. in shaping the social construction of the aim and purpose of the project.

The consociational democracy model in Macedonia, which came out from a warcrisis and a peace agreement from 2001, in addition, putting an end to the violent conflict, actually admits the division of the society along the ethnic lines. Paradoxically, there is an attempt to bridge the ethnic gap with this model. As a result, the consociational democracy model holds solutions that can be abused if somebody misuses its power and desires to disintegrate the country. The future development depends therefore on the moderate attitude of the citizens, and first and foremost, on the political elites and their commitment to the values of democracy and human rights instead of their nationalistic goals. Furthermore, thepresent democratic consolidation in Macedonia is established on the execution of the peace agreement and the improved effectiveness of the institutions.

This qualitative study investigates the conditions on the labour market for disabled people by examining which factors and processes contribute to disabled peoples inclusion to, or exclusion from the open labour market. Stigmatisation is also used as an analytical tool to better understand the exclusion of disabled people from the open labour market. The material to this study is drawn from qualitative interviews with the employees of the Swedish Employment Agency which specialises in supporting disabled people to find employment.  In conclusion, disabled people face several barriers which makes them more susceptible to become excluded from the open labour market. Such excluding barriers include a demand for high efficiency and productivity from employers, bigger cooperation?s and public organisations unwillingness to employ disabled people and prejudices from employers, especially against people with psychiatric disabilities. The employees of the Swedish Employment Agency suggest that they would be able to work more efficiently to help disabled people find employment if they had to do less administrative work, and would be able to work with fewer clients per employee.

Since a decade back in time, Sweden is officially recognised as a multicultural society. Different cultures exist side by side and the city of Malmo is one of the clearest examples of this setting. In multicultural societies, the dichotomy of ?us? versus ?them? is common, which leads to segregation and asymmetrical relations of power. The concept of intercultural education is in theory known to be able to create a position of ?us? where every culture is equally recognized and reinterpreted and thus become an alternative to the dichotomy.

Medborgarsammanslutningar har funnits i Sverige sedan 1800-talet och delas upp i folkrörelser, som är av mer ideell karaktär, och intresseorganisationer som sätter de egna medlemmarnas bästa i första rummet. Medborgerligt deltagande i det politiska systemet motiveras med att demokratin ökar då medborgarna tillåts uttrycka sina åsikter. Det svenska systemet har länge präglats av en hög grad av korporatism där medborgarsammanslutningar i hög grad har inkorporerats inom kommunalt och statligt beslutsfattande. Idag talas det dock allt oftare om att det svenska systemet håller på att förändras, att det pågår en avkorporatisering. Enligt många forskare håller det svenska samhället på att ersättas av en växande pluralism där medborgarsammanslutningarnas starka band till staten löses upp.

This thesis is a comparative analysis of language policy in the Post-Soviet states Ukraine and Kazakhstan, wherein the states are seen as rational actors using language as an instrument in the nation-building process. With a take-off point in an underframe of theories on the nation, national identity, instrumentalism, power and the particular role of language in the nation-building process, this thesis shows that language is a key instrument used by the two states.The Ukrainian and Kazakhian language policies create and put across a certain image of the nation, by emphasising the titular languages as symbols of the new states. The line of argument in the language policy is a balance act between large-scale promotion of titular languages and a careful and inclusive attitude towards the Russian language. The biggest differences are that Ukraine, compared to Kazakhstan, has a more comprehensive and consequent language policy with a deeply rooted historic rhetoric. The most obvious instruments of the states in language policy is censuses, corpus-planning and the state choosing one official language..

Argentina var först i världen med att införa lagstadgad kvotering av kvinnor till parlamentet. Målet med kvoteringen var att öka jämställdheten, detta genom att ge kvinnorna mer inflytande. Det har dock visat sig att kvinnornas inflytande över politiken inte ökat i samma takt som deras antal och vi försöker i vår uppsats förklara detta. Vi gör det med hjälp av teori om vikten av kvinnors organisering i politiska sammanhang, och det motstånd denna organisering ofta möter. Uppsatsen är en fallstudie baserad på feministisk teori, forskning om kvinnor i politiken samt material om främst Argentina och Latinamerika.

AbstractUSA:s biståndspolitik har främst använts strategiskt för att främja nationella intressen. Bi-stånd kan vara ett effektivs sätt för en stat att utöva ekonomisk makt över en annan. USA har gett bistånd till Israel sedan början av 50-talet då USA:s stora population av judar har skapat ett närmast inrikespolitiskt intresse i landet.Egypten har efter att fredsföredrag skrevs med Israel 1979 erhållit stora summor i militärt och ekonomiskt bistånd från USA. Det har varit viktigt för USA att se till att Egypten håller freden med Israel samt att ha en av arabstaterna som allierad i Mellanöstern. Egypten har varit det land som, efter Israel, fått mest bistånd från USA.Pakistans geografiska läge har under perioder varit ytterst viktig för USA, framför allt på grund av hotet från Sovjetunionen under Kalla kriget.USA:s strategiska biståndspolitik förklarar vi utifrån realistisk teori inom internationell politik..

Social policy has now received an increased attention in the European Union. The European welfare states experience a high level of unemployment, which the EU now tries to handle through the European Employment Strategy (EES). The core of this essay is whether the welfare institutions of the European member states are integrating through an institutionalization process or not. Within the EU four different types of welfare models can be identified: the Scandinavian, the Continental, the Southern and the Anglo-Saxon. The welfare models differ in the institutional settings e.g.

At the EU summit in Cologne in 1999, a consensus was reached concerning the common foreign and security policy within the European Union. It was decided at the summit that the WEU (Western European Union) should be incorporated into the EU - whom would then be given military capability to act autonomously without the necessity of Nato involvement. This essay investigates the factors that made this agreement possible from a rational choice perspective, but also from the perspective of the power and influence on negotiations on behalf of various types of leadership present at the meeting. Many nations at the summit of Cologne where for the creation of a military force in the form of ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) within the Union, and many where against such a decision. However a consensus was reached and that is what this essay shall try to explain.

The purpose of this essay was to analyze the collapse of democracy in the Weimar Republic. This was done by analyzing some of the most turbulent crises in its history like the communists attempt to take power in 1919, the kapp-putsch of 1920, hyperinflation 1923 and the economic depression 1929-1933. The method that I used in this essay is called methodological individualism. It was an analytical framework which helped to understand the citizens view on democracy and legitimacy. The theoretical framework was based on Juan J.Linz and Seymour Martin Lipsets ideas on legitimacy and efficacy.

AbstractCities are once again becoming the locus of economic, social and political processes. The effect of these processes on the city is two-fold: one one hand they threaten to fragment and dislocate the city and the actors within them, on the other hand they give actors within cities new opportunities to react and mobilize resources towards different strategies of integration. The latter gives rise to what Patrick Le Galès calls the collective actor-city. The aim of this thesis is to explore the notion of the city as a collective actor in a swedish context by utilizing Le Galès theory of european cities as collective actors in an abductive case study on the city of Malmoe. By utilizing Le Galès five dimensions that make up a collective actor I analyze interviews conducted with city officals aswell as documents produced from the city wide plan of action Welfare for everybody.

AbstractDue to the success of the Populist Party Sverigedemokraterna in the Swedish election of 2006, the daily paper Sydsvenska Dagbladet published a number of columns written by well-known academics, writers and debaters. Their aim was to address the question of why this happened in the election and what it is in the Swedish society today that brought forward these trends. The first and the last word was given to the writer Fredrik Ekelund, and therefore the debate was named Ekelunddebatten.The debaters are fighting to present their view of the world as the only option when categorizing different societal groups and appointing themselves as group representatives. My aim is to unravel these different conceptions of the world and to do this I use the Dicourse Analysis as a method. I discuss the results with Critical Discourse Theory as a theoretical base and also from the view of the current societal discourses: the working class discourse, the multicultural discourse and the discourse of political correctness.I mainly observe four different conceptions of the world with different posing of problems.