The study aims to investigate student participation as a tool for democratic development in secondary school from a student perspective. Furthermore, students' perceptions of the school's work with student participation in formal and informal contexts are also investigated, with basis in the teaching structure. The results are based on interviews conducted with students who all attend the same class in their last year of high school. Subsequently, an analysis is made based mainly on three different theories: democracy, curricula and sociocultural theory. The result shows that students feel that they are able to practice student participation but the amount of influence they get differs between individuals depending on devotion and commitment.

Earlier research has shown that young and adult citizens in Europe participate in politics in different ways. While adult citizens participate in more traditional ways, non-traditional ways are more frequent among younger citizens. Moreover, issue-based participation increases when Europeans turn away from mainstream politics. Citizens in the European Union EU-15 between 15-24 ages are likely to be ?critical? citizens of a working democracy compared to people in older ages (Sloam, 2016).

Homelessness has always been and will always be a problem in every society. How should we organize the work and care for these people? There are three different types of welfare states, the liberal, the conservative and the social democratic. In the liberal welfare state the market is the supplier of the public good. In the conservative state the family and church and in the social democratic the state is the supplier of the public welfare.The Swedish welfare state has been the archetype of social democratic welfare with de principal of ?Folkhemmet? in focus.

The aim of this thesis is to study the cause of Egypt´s failed development of the transition to democracy and vice versa, the reason why Turkey succeeded in democratic transition. Thesis methodology is a comparative analysis between design units Egypt and Turkey. Thus, the most similar design used in the investigation.European Commission began in 1998 to review Turkey´s political and economic reforms to fulfil the Copenhagen criteria. 2005 began negotiations on a Turkish- EU membership. U.S and Egypt have enjoyed close economic, security and democratic cooperation since 1975.

This thesis examines the democracy theories that can be found in the internet websites of Region Skåne and Stockholm county council. Within the framework of deliberative democracy, participatory democracy and electoral democracy, the author tries to distinguish democratic aspects by empirically studying these websites and their communicative effect on the internet users.This research shows that Region Skåne is slightly better in implementing democratic aspects at their home page, which is probably due to an active work with these issues carried out by the politicians and the report on the democratic development from 2004. However, a great deal of work regarding democracy and the possibility of civic participation in the decision- making process is still to be done.The problems and challenges in using internet as a democratic tool shows that citizens run a risk of being neglected, due to their uneven participation in using internet in daily life. The conclusion of this thesis is that the politicians have to make an active choice in deciding to what extent the internet is allowed to be used when it comes to developing democracy. This work has to be done in cooperation with political scientists and IT experts, in order to assure a correct democratic model..

The aim of this essay is to examine whether democracy in St Petersburg isconsolidated or not. Since studies of democratic transition have been rarelyconducted on post-communist cities, this study seems fruitful. Using the Linz andStepan theory, where democracy is considered consolidated when it has become?the only game in town? and Orttung's three criteria legitimacy, politicalpolarisation and policy effectiveness; this essay analyzes people's attitudes,political behaviour, the rule of law and civil society in St Petersburg. Theory isused to interpret the material mainly consisting of two interviews and newspaperarticles.

The European Union is seen as democratic, and one of the criteria for a democratic decision process is that it must be fully transparent for the citizens. That is the only way for them to make their own decisions about political issues, and it is only possible as long as the citizens have access to relevant and reliable information. However, this is not always the case within the European Union, since it is often difficult to get a hold of different documents of the institutions, and since the civil servants to a great extent are forbidden to give away any information..

Civil disobedience constitutes an interesting ethical phenomena in the democraticstate since the people performing it consciously brakes laws and norms in societyfor purposes they themselves judge to be morally good and just. This thesisexamines whether the phenomena of civil disobedience is justifiable in ademocratic society.In this study civil disobedience is analyzed on two levels. First the problem isanalyzed on a theoretical level in relative to the three, by us established, values:respect for the law, the will of the majority and equality. Second, civildisobedience is analyzed on a more practical level where we test our theoreticalline of argument with the help of two example groups who engages in civildisobedience. The justification of civil disobedience is also analyzed through twoethical perspectives on acting, deontology and consequentialism.Our conclusion is that civil disobedience is justifiable on a theoretical level inrelative to the values we discuss.

In recent years, the right-wing extremist site Avpixlat (?Unveiled?) and the anti-racist blog Inte rasist, men... (?Not a racist, but??, IRM) have established themselves as political actors and platforms for political discussion in Sweden. However, we know very little about them and their impact on democracy.

This paper examines the amount of influence that upper secondary school pupils of the Swedish voluntary school system. The curriculum clearly states that democratic values are to be instilled with the pupils at an early age, and that the pupils are to have a degree of democratic influence over their tutelage. This paper is based upon a survey, which involves one hundred and fourteen pupils at the Malmö Latin gymnasium. The hypothesis argues that upper secondary school pupils in Sweden have very little knowledge in this area and it contradicts much of the previous research done in this field. The pupils´ ages vary from fifteen to eighteen years of age.The survey shows that the pupils of this school have little or no knowledge of their democratic rights within the school boundaries.

In a global context the traditional democratic process is facing new challenges. Scholars are talking about a transition from government to governance, where local and regional networks as well as international collaboration are an important part in how regional policy is produced and implemented. In this paper the processes in regional projects funded by the European Union are considered, and related to the traditional democratic process. The study has been fulfilled through informant interviews with representatives from four EU-projects. The interviews are supplemented by a qualitative text analysis of current statutes.

Discussions about the democratic deficit of the European Union have gotten more intense and the criticism usually points towards a great gap between the citizens and the EU politics. In this study the political communication policy is being put under the scope to investigate to what extent the policy is designed to counter the democratic deficit, supported by the theory of deliberative democracy. The analysis examines three aspects of the deficit ? decentralization, participation and the distribution of information ? and makes research into the communicative measures that have been implemented. The importance for EU to make deliberation possible is stressed throughout the essay and in the conclusion I argue that improvements still need to be made.  .

The number of public schools in Sweden has increased strongly over the past twenty years. This essay gives a possible explanation to how the Social Democratic Party in Sweden took part in this evaluation from 1987 to 1997. I've analysed how the party's ideology in this issue was shaped and adapted to the opposite politics, when the Liberals and Conservatives Parties were in government.The empirical analyse is primarily based on official documents from the Parlament such as debates, government bills and motions. I have also studied the Social Democratic Party's congresses which took place during this period of time. I have practised two different theories in analysing the motives behind the acting.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the discourse on political exclusion in the official report Demokratiutredningen. It has been my ambition to relate the analysis of the report to a critical academic discourse on political exclusion and thereby make visible hidden norms and structures which functions to exclude certain individuals and groups from political participation.My paper point out that the report establishes a strong link between democracy and participation and that it, therefore, makes a strong case for a process of democratic inclusion. Though, in my study I suggest that that there is an unawareness of the importance of norms, hegemonic conceptions and structures and that inclusion, therefore, is unlikely to take place. Furthermore, I criticize the focus on deliberative democracy in the report. With insights offered by Mouffe in her argumentation on the necessity to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism present in all societies I underline that the focus on this democratic model is problematic.My conclusion is that the analysis presented in the report is insufficient if we want to create a democratic system characterized by equality..

The aim of this study is to investigate wether the participatory democracy is a threat or a complement to the representative democracy. To achieve my purpose I will focus on two different lokal councils, the civil council in Hovsjö and the youth council in Västra Skogås, which have been objects of the urban policy in 1998. The theoretical framework on which this study is based consists of the participation democratic theory, representative democratic theory and implementation theory. By problemizing these theoretical frameworks in comparison with eachother I will mapp how these two lokal councils were implemented. The research question is: In what way was the civil council and the youth council a complement or threat to the representative democracy? In which way was it difficult to implement them?The method used for this purpose is a qualitative comparative case study.