The purpose of this paper is to analyze Martti Ahtisaari?s comprehensive reportfor Kosovo, CPS, based on theories about democracy, democratization andmulticulturalism. The essay is a way to make a contribution to research on howthe international community can contribute to democratization processes ingeneral, as the CPS gives the expression and democratization of contextscharacterized by multicultural problems in particular. In this paper, we implementa qualitative text analysis of our main material CPS. The qualitative text analysiscan be applied in studies as ours when sought contents of the text are hidden underthe surface.

On the 17th of January 2002 the Swedish government presented a bill to theSwedish parliament, proposing ways of strengthening the Swedish democracythrough reforms for increased elements of participatory democracy. A publicreport on the state of the Swedish democracy had been released two years earlierwith similar enthusiasm for participatory democracy. However, the participatoryideals of these two documents were strongly criticised by a group of scholars.The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the arguments articulatedbetween the years 2000 and 2002 by the actors mentioned above, and to examinetheir relation to arguments concerning political participation, articulated bythinkers from previous times. By classifying the arguments into different groupsdepending on their content I find that both parties in the Swedish argumentationfocus on the effects of participatory democracy on political equality, on theefficiency of the political decision-making and the quality of the decisions beingmade, and finally on the personal character of the citizens. Among the argumentsarticulated by thinkers from previous times, similarities with the Swedishargumentation can be seen as well as important differences.

How the United States anti-terrorist strategy is affecting the view of democracy is the main analysis of this paper. The mechanisms that affect the idea of democracy have been studied on the basis of the philosopher Michael Foucault?s thoughts and the main direction in French discourse analysis. The study is restricted to the period between the 11th of September 2001 and today. Information has been collected entirely from the White House?s website http://www.whitehouse.gov, including speeches, conferences and reports.

Deliberative democracy theory has been prominent within political science research since the early 1990?s, often applied in studies on postnational democratic constellations, in particular the European Union. Of the main institutions of the union, the European Parliament stands out as somewhat understudied from this point of view, which is why the main aim of this thesis is to study the conditions for deliberative democracy in the European Parliament.From deliberative democratic theory four criteria have been selected to function as methodological framework in analysing the institutional structure and proceedings of the parliament. Each of the criteria is applied separately to the practice and function of the plenary sessions, the parliamentary committees and the political groups. The analysis shows that the conditions for deliberative democracy differ between the three fora, as do their respective roles in parliament, but all in all they supplement each other.

In the present case, the conception of policy hitchhiking gets evaluated in terms of its implications for democracy. This task is executed through the accomplishment of a case study of the use of social- and environmental clauses in the Swedish competitive tendering.A useful definition of policy hitchhiking, including different types of actors, is created.Through the defining of democracy and policy hitchhiking, the author comes to the conclusion that policy hitchhiking in some respects does meet democracy values.The thesis? result can in some sense be regarded as a contribution to the pursuit of knowledge of how power is distributed in the society and how the current distribution can be explained and understood..

This study is about youths, democracy and school. It seeks to describe and problemize the school's role in the democratic society. Firstly, using Social Representations Theory, 44 upper secondary shool pupils? representations, or conceptions, of democracy are described and discussed. These representations are then analyzed in relation to the school's role in the democratic society, as it is described by different researchers.The results show that many of the youths have a rather simplistic and abstract view of democracy, describing it only in terms of general principles and the main features of the representative democracy, such as voting in national elections.

Democracy is said to uphold the dearest values and be the most moral system. But it cannot be characterized as a rigid "syste" but a continuously changing political framework, under which aims and values can be fulfilled - and replaced.The increasingly diverse and ever-changing environment of contemporary democracies forces change upon the systems' natural evolution, which makes their future features uncertain and unforeseeable. A powerful change-force doctrine does however claim change is mainly (or merely) caused by the power of ideas; the elite power over ideas can thus provide a natural foundation for the analysis of the direction of development for democracy. This study aims to provide such a foundation by reconstructing empirical and normative descriptions of democracy at two certain points in time, following extensive government studies.As a tool for analysis, this study identifies values of substantial and procedural character central to democracy theory and discourse. It further creates ideal types of democracy based on these values, to which the nature of democracy is measured.

This essay examines a presupposed correlation between the way one look upon values and the way one look upon the will of the people in a theoretical democratic context. The more specific purpose is to test the following hypothesis: There is a reversed connection between the way one look upon values and the way one look upon the will of the people in a theoretical democratic context, that is; a strong claim of values give reason to a limited conception of the will of the people and a weak claim of values gives reason for a more unlimited conception of the will of the people.In order to test the hypothesis I examine three different conceptions of democracy, these are: pluralist democracy, deliberative democracy and constitutional democracy. I analyze the way they look upon values, there view of the will of the people and finally if there is a connection between the way they look upon values and the will of the people. Values should be understood in a metaethical context. In other words it is not values in the ?common? meaning, instead its how val-ues in them selves should be understood, and even more relevant, what we mean when we ex-press values.My conclusions are, first and foremost, that there is a correlation between the will of the people and values, according to the formulation of the hypothesis.

AbstractIn the beginning of 2007 the Swedish municipality Örebro decided to have a democraticexperiment, which ought to go under the name, ?Dialouge for the citizens?. Therepresentative elected politicians in Örebro tried to find ways to involve the people in theprocess of ruling. Why they choose to try this experiment on this very delicate matter, theclosure of several schools in the municipal, is one of the questions this essay is trying toanswer.The purpose of this essay is to find out whether the process was an attempt for the politiciansof the representative democracy to implement deliberative democracy in the structure of thelocal governance.The result of this study is that the politicians didn?t manage to reach to the citizens the waythey formerly had planned..

The purpose of this paper is to study the subject Islam and Democracy and see whatcommonalities exist between the two ideas and traditions of thoughts. The subject is topicaland often highlighted by the media in the West. The Islamic voices that we hear today iscertainly not democratic, given the violence and hatred carried out by Islamic extremistsagainst the West. The investigation of this paper have shown a different direction when thereare other voices such as those investigated reformist thinkers who argue that Islam has manydemocratic elements, and even that Islam is more suitable than democracy. According to thereformists ismodel of an Islamic state is democratic and legitimate.

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.

The present state of politics in contemporary Venezuela portrays a country of polarization, a chase for power and accusations of authoritarian and even undemocratic rule. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to examine the democracy in Venezuela, in order to clarify the sometimes vauge perception of the political situation. By applying the theories of polyarchical democracy put forth by Robert Dahl, one of the most highly regarded theorists on the subject, accordingly the discussion will therefore follow a theoretical framework. Dahl requires seven nstitutions to be guaranteed in a democracy, amongst them the possibility to vote, run for public office and the practise of freedom of speech. Measuring Dahl's levels of institutions in Venezuela, it is made clear that the level of democracy vary in different areas.

This Masters thesis examines the position of films in Swedish public libraries. We have, by way of comparing various statistical data, determined that the status of film in public libraries is week. We have completed earlier research by mapping what genealogical, discursive patterns that could be outlined in the Swedish government reports from 1949 until today, focussing on the activity goals and media policy of the public library. We have, on the basis of Foucaults theories on genealogy and archaeology, where text documents are considered to be meta-descriptions giving each other authority, analyzed if there any discursive excluding or contextual formulations exist in the usage of the language concerning the goals and the media attitude of public libraries. We have mapped contextual discursive formulations that to the commissioners have become neutral starting points for their assumptions and conclusions.

This Master Thesis aims to study and discuss the occurence of three concepts in some influential cultural policy documents which includes the UNESCO public library manifesto, the Swedish libraries act, the Swedish cultural policy objectives, and a study from the mid nineties which deals with the cultural policy. The questions asked are: -Do the documents mention democracy? In what way? -Do the documents mention the public sphere? In what way? -Do the documents mention information? In what way? -How can we understand the content of the documents through relevant theories about democracy, the public sphere and information? Theories about the information society are used, as well as theories from Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Schiller and Robert Dahl. The way of method is document studies and abduktion, with influences from hermeneutic theory. The analysis deals with the documents through these concepts: democracy, the public sphere and information and puts forward the content, or lack of content, about democracy in the analysed material.

This Master?s thesis examines library courses, a relatively new form of user education. Our focus is on the pedagogical point-of-views reflected in the text in these library courses. The primary purpose of the study is to analyze the pedagogical discourse displayed in the library courses to determine if the perspective is behavioural, cognitive, constructive or socio cultural. We are investigating if the pedagogical discourse differs from course to course, and if so, how are they different? In addition we aim to find out how the pedagogical discourse in the library courses relates to university websites and governmental and legal texts, at the discursive and social practice level.