The main purpose of this essay was to study whether niche parties that were represented in municipal councils in Sweden during the 2007-2010 term of office were politically relevant. Furthermore, factors that might facilitate political relevance for niche parties were studied. Political relevance was studied using two theoretical perspectives. The objective model of political relevance presents four categories of relevance based on the relations between political parties in a political assembly; governing parties, coalition parties, blackmail parties and isolated parties. The subjective model of political relevance relies on the party representatives? own judgments of the relevance of their parties.

This thesis deals with non-wanted political parties e.g. right wing populism. How should a democracy handle these opinions? So far these parties have been neglected and not even considered as real parties. By excluding them from the debate and the political arena, media and more established parties have seen them merely as a threat than as democratic parties.

In December 2004 an earthquake coursed waves that hit Thailand. Over 5000 people died, and Sweden was the tourist country that has been effected the worst. The catastrophe precipitated Sweden in crises and the demand became high for Swedish government to act. Swedes followed the development via media, why media became the crucial element for how the public perceived politicians? acting.

This study aims to investigate the origin and the development of a certain type of decision phenomena, namely political decision chains. A political decision chain is defined as a seemingly rational decision being made, that is reverted through a new decision and this for other reasons than the original decision being regarded as having fulfilled its intended purpose. The essay attempts to explain the occurrence of these decision chains through a case study in order to thoroughly examine the complexities that surround political decisions overall. The essay concludes that uncontrollable factors and chance to a large extent affect the origin of these chains, allowing actors to change the political agenda according to their preferences. The relative weighting of these factors that is made by the actors, which exist within the decision chain, makes them underestimate the relative power of other actors that may have different preferences.

Political disenchantment and detachment is proven to be growing in well established democracies. This development brings along concerning behavior regarding general political participation. Fewer citizens participate in elections, parties are losing members, and the trust in politicians is steadily decreasing. IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) has been registering voter turnout worldwide for the last 60 years and their publications show a decline in voter participation since the 1980s.During the same period of time another development has caught attention, namely the fast progress of the medium Internet. The new generation of Internet functions is called Web 2.0 and allows users not only to create content, but also to interact with each other.This dissertation aims to explore the possibilities emerging when integrating Web 2.0 in political processes.

Researchers in the field of political corruption generally expect voters in democratic states to lose trust in corrupted politicians. However, there are cases where corrupted politicians maintain their popularity, a phenomenon studied in this thesis. Focus lies on three cases of political corruption: the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who has been the subject of several judicial investigations and court cases; the impeached former president of Lithuania, Rolandas Paksas; and the German Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) involvement in a party funding scandal. The cases are chosen based on the method of agreement. Berlusconi, Paksas and CDU have all, in spite of their corrupt behaviour, kept or regained popular support among a large group of their country's citizens.

Introduction: In this investigation I have illustrated, teacher treatment in a mono-cultural pre-school class and in a multicultural pre-school.Purpose: The purpose of the study was to illustrate how educators go about it when they face bilingual children to see how they work in a comparative perspective. The purpose was answered, based on four questions relating to how teachers relate to the meeting with bilingual children, the approach teachers use, which operation mode the use, if the take advantage of children's traditions, and if there is any different in the teachers? treatment of bilingual children in the mono-cultural pre-school class and in the multicultural pre-school.Theories: The theory is linked to the concepts like operation mode, inter-cultural approaches and communications.Methodology: The used methods are qualitative interviews with four pre-school, teachers where an interview guide with formulated questions and observations were used. The purpose of the working methods was to highlight teacher treatment of bilingual children to discover different approaches to meet the bilingual children.Conclusion: The study has shown that the multicultural pre-school working inter-culturally, they are taking advantage of children's home language that is lifted in the nursery and the children's background, while in the mono-cultural pre-school class, they meet bilingual children foremost to develop the Swedish language and they also show interest to the children's traditions. Teachers? treatment leads to a growing confidence in the children and knowledge for the cultural background..

Groups that are often referred to as being dismissed in society in general is by some aspects also considered being so in political arenas. A recent compilation of existing research over structurally based objections of gaining power and positions within Swedish parliamentary politics highlight a lack of research considering whether sexual orientation could be such a discriminatory basis. Using a queer theoretical approach, and drawing on concepts such as heteronormativity and homophobia, the principal aim of this essay is to illuminate aspects of local parliamentary political areas where discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation become relevant. In order to do so six in-depth interviews with homosexual politicians have been conducted. Finding a queer potential in certain ideological parliamentary political environments that enable homosexual politicians to be open about their sexual orientation, it still relies upon the individual to be confident enough not to interpret the political context as homophobic and heteronormative..

The aim of this master?s thesis is to investigate a possible connection between the development of mobile library services in Sweden and the development of cultural policy during 1945-2006. Our main question is: is there a connection between the development of the mobile library services in Sweden, as described in Biblioteksbladet, and the development of cultural policy as portrayed by Anders Frenander and Dorte Skot-Hansen? In order to answer this question, we formulated two secondary questions: - How are the mobile library services described in Biblioteksbladet between 1945 and 2006? - Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between the development of the mobile library services and the development cultural policy as described in our theoretical models? If so, in what way? Our study covers the entire time period since the start of the mobile library services in Sweden in the late 1940s. The final year for our investigation is 2006.

The principal questions that are high lightened in this study are: How is the discrimination of the Indigenous people in Latin-America represented in the works of Jose María Arguedas and Miguel Angel Asturias? How are these two authors interrelated in terms of the defense of a cultural belonging? And finally, can these be associated to Paulo Coelho?s narrative content and techniques?This work shows how, as Nelson Gonzalez-Ortega names it, a narrative discourse of resistance (based on the consequences of the cultural merging of the European and Latin-American people) is expressed and transformed into modern literature. It shows how the works of these authors protect and transmit the interests and the cultural origins of the Latin-American Indigenous people. These origins are expressed by language, myths, storytelling techniques and the presentation of an alternative perspective of the world. It also shows, through analysis of their writing, how some of these authors as dual cultural human beings struggled to balance the two cultural elements they are constituted of.Focus will be on Asturias Hombrez de Maiz, Arguedas Los ríos profundos and Coelhos 11 minutos and El Zahir..

One hundred years ago, boys and girls in Sweden went to school in two parallel educational systems. The girl schools were privately owned and had two educational goals; education for the household and education for work outside the home. The girl schools were free to give the education they thought was right, but around the turn of the century women?s education became an issue of growing political interest.The purpose of my study is to shine light on the idea-political impact on the teaching in the turn of the century independent girl schools. I ask two questions; What types of subjects did girl school pupils write essays about, and how do they change over time? Seen from a genus perspective, what is the relation between the essay subjects and the idea-political trends at a higher societal level?I conduct a quantitative study of Swedish essay subjects at a girl school in Växjö between the years 1884-1929.

Why participate? Many studies focus on explaning non-participation in politics. The political parties are loosing members and the particiaption of young people are given extra attention. This thesis is about young people who do participate in party politics. The question is how they experience their participation and how they feel that they can have a politcal influence by being a member of the youth section of a political party.

Abstract: The purpose with this study is to analyse the political debate about freedom of speech in Sweden and Denmark, after the caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed that the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten published in September 2005. For this debate four political parties have been chosen. These are: Socialdemokratiska Partiet and Moderata Samlingspartiet in Sweden and Socialdemokraterne and Venstre in Denmark.An idea analysis has been chosen as method, and dimensions as an analysing tool. The overall result of the analysis is that right- and left political parties in Sweden and Denmark are more alike, than different in their political debate about free speech. They all wish for total freedom of speech, and see that as the foundation of the democratic society.

The aim of this bachelor thesis has been to examine and develop our own understanding about how young people in Sweden (16-29 years of age), take part in cultural activities. As librarians it is important to know what kind of activities and interests this particular group has. With Pierre Bourdieu?s theoretical framework towards habitus and capital we are interested to see if there is a connection between one?s cultural use and background, if different access to capital with or within groups has an affect or not. With both statistics and interviews with people within our target, we believe this data has been sufficient enough to conduct a good and valid study.

The Swedish government published their current proposition concerning cultural politics,Tid för kultur in 2009. Due to this proposition, culture is considered a basic human right we all deserve to be provided with. It contained goals and guidelines for how to enable culture to all citizens, to integrate and enrich the state, the county councils? and municipalities? work with diversity and multi culture in their culture-based institutes. However, there seems to be a lack of strategies in the issue of how to provide our nondependent elderly, suffering age related handicaps and diseases, with this proclaimed necessity.In recent years, there has been a lot of research proving the link between human wellbeing and a stimulating environment.