The social dimension in the EU, explored through the document texts of the Treaty of Rome, the Lisbon Strategy, the Social Policy Agenda and the Swedish Strategy ReportThis paper explores the social dimension of EU social policy, except the aspects of the economic and labour market. The EU documents reveal an underlying line of thought stemming from the alignment of the six founding countries, spearheaded by France, with the conservative corporatist welfare model. As one of four European welfare models, the conservative corporatist model emphasises labour market issues, corporate social responsibility and the subsidiarity principle in EU social policy. It also influences how the texts define the terms social, social policy and social exclusion. The definitions determine how policymakers combat problems such as social exclusion and identify the policy issues to be included in EU social policy.The Swedish Strategy shows how the country is responding to the objectives that it has been assigned by the EU and how it plans to attain them.

The aim of this study is to analyze the process of an agenda setting and see how a specific issue came to materialize on the security policy agenda. The empirical goal of the study is to see why Sweden chose to participate in the EU-led operation to Chad, and how that process came to be? The analysis is based upon Kingdon's multiple streams theory (2003) where he distinguishes the process into three streams. Central for his theory is the coupling of these streams and the importance of a policy entrepreneur. I complement Kingdon's theory of policy entrepreneurs by taking inspiration from Hinnfors (1995), Gustavsson (1999) and especially Eriksson (2000) and their analysis of policy change and agenda setting.

Since the introduction of the European citizenship in the Maastricht treaty, social rights havetaken a back seat to the economic and political elements. Nevertheless, over the past yearssocial issues have been increasingly included on the agenda following the universalrecognition of challenges resulting from further economic integration and demographicchange. The extensive research on European social policy so far tend to focus on initiativesput forward by the European Commission, and offers little to explain the multitude of lines ofreasoning on how far EU social policy should be taken or why it still remains one of the leastdeveloped policy areas. By examining plenary debates in the European Parliament concerningfamily policy, this Bachelor thesis aims to describe the complex of problems connected to afurther development of the social dimension of the European citizenship.The analysis finds that the most imminent problems impeding an expansion of the EU familypolicy lie not only in the many clashes of opinions between advocates of the various existingwelfare models, but also in the conflicts of interests and the different levels of ambitionbetween EU institutions - most notably the Commission and the European Parliament..

The concept of national security has been a matter for debate during recent years, especially in academic fields. Criticism has surfaced since the end of the cold war, directed towards the traditional perspective's dogmatic focus on armed threats and interstate war. Questions concerning an oncoming paradigm shift have been raised, regarding a widening of the security agenda among national states to also include alternative threats, such as environmental hazards. In this thesis, the focus lies on the effects that climate changes have caused in the Swedish national security agenda during the last 15 years. Swedish policy documents show that there have been some major changes, not only the widening of the security agenda but the entire security domain seems to have changed.

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..

AbstractIn this essay, policy change and learning is studied in the case of the Social Democratic Party and their policy concerning independent schools. Their policy differs clearly from the right-wing parties. Between 1991 and 1994, the right-wing government made substantial reforms concerning independent schools. The question posed in this essay is whether the policy of the Social Democratic Party has changed as a result of these actions, and if they have approached their right-wing counterparts.Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework, defining a policy as a result of the values the actor holds, the question is studied by applying the theory's assumptions of policy-learning across coalitions. The argumentation of the Social Democratic Party, as it is expressed in official text documents before and after the right-wing government, is analysed.

In this essay I analyze the concepts security and security policy from a critical, feministic point of view. The traditional way of thinking security is state-centred and narrow with its military oriented threatening pictures and solutions.I advocate that the two concepts need a more feministic and holistic approach to be able to cope with the threats of our time and include the security for women explicitly.To suggest how this can be done I introduce a model; security-sphere, which should be seen as a way to constructively connect my objections to the existing research with a new approach to security problems. The security-sphere is based on two analytical parts; the private security sub-sphere and the public security sub-sphere, in order to make new images of security problems visible.It is a fact that most of the threats against women specifically, take place in the private sphere where no traditional analytical tools reach in - these threats have not been seen as 'real' security problems. My aim is therefore to integrate these issues into the agenda of security policy..

The economic policy of the Swedish Social Democrats has undergone major changes during the last thirty years. From using a so-called Keynesian policy to promote full employment in the economy, the Social Democrats have switched to a more monetaristic policy to promote low inflation instead. What I intend to do with this study is to see if the policy change also can be noticed in how the party describe their own policy. Have the Social Democrats been open and transparent with their change in priorities, or have they tried to hide this in their rhetoric?The purpose of this thesis is to examine if one can notice a change from a Keynesian to a monetaristic policy in the Social Democrat?s descriptions of their economic policy.

The purpose of this paper was to discuss stigma and stigmatisation in relation to social policy and social work. By discussing welfare systems in social policy I wanted to see if there could be any connection between social policy and stigma. I used case studies of hearing impaired adults to give examples of how the stigma processes work. By connecting the stigma and the social policy theories with the case studies I wanted to see how the social policy could affect the stigma processes or vice versa.In the paper the concept of stigma has been described and discussed, foremost using the theories of Erving Goffman. I have also discussed the welfare system and the connection between residual systems and stigma.

The aim of this study was to describe, analyze and compare the Left Party?s, the Social Democratic Party?s, the Liberal People?s Party?s and the Moderate Party?s ideas on immigration policy from 1960-2010. In this study the immigration policy program or party program was analyzed through idea analysis to find out what immigration policy interventions they have come with, and if they want to assimilate or integrate immigrants. Materials used for the study are the immigration policy programs and party programs. Even scientific journals and articles have been used, in both national and international level.

This Bachelor Thesis looks at the cooperation between the Swedish civil society and theEuropean Union (EU), and it aims at evaluating Swedish civil society organizations' influencewithin the EU's development work on policy level. It focuses primarily on eight civil societyorganizations, and it is based on empirical material collected in Stockholm and Gothenburg,Sweden. The material has been analyzed using three theoretical frameworks. The firstdetermines whether the structure of the EU allows bottom-up influence, the second looks atthe communication between the EU and civil society organizations, and the third assesseswhether the civil society has the ability to influence the political agenda within the EU?sdevelopment work.Conclusions of the thesis include determining the complex structure of the EU as a mainobstacle to influencing the EU's development work.

During the time of membership in The European Union Swedish domestic policy has gone through many changes. A lot more political areas are being influenced by the EU policy. Today every ministry has got some sort of EU office. Swedish politicians are functioning on two arenas, domestic and European. At the same time Swedish membership has gone from being highly discussed to being a state of normality.

Making decisions have always been part of human life. Political decisions consist of many participants with both formal and informal ways to highlight problems and reach the political agenda. Processes difficult for an individual to distinguish and understand surround political decision-making. The purpose of this study is to investigate the decision process for a specific political issue, Swedish wine producers' desire to be able to sell their own wine at their vineyard; gårdsförsäljning. This is currently prohibited in the Swedish model due to an alcohol monopoly.

After the appointment of a new European Commission in 2004, ?communication? was made a top priority on the agenda. The Commission presented a new communication policy, which would establish a dialogue with the citizens, thereby bringing more democracy to the union and bridging the gap to the citizens. Three documents containing the policy were published, namely an internal action plan for the Commission, Plan D which establishes the framework for national debates and a whitepaper on EU communication policy. These documents were met by mistrust and criticism from many different actors such as journalists and experts.The aim of this master thesis is to examine this new communication policy from a deliberative democratic perspective.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of market-led culture, focusing on literature, within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business by comparing the attitudes and ideas expressed in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. To illuminate, and with an effort to explain, these attitudes and ideas expressed in the documents their political and social context has been studied as well. The theoretical starting point is two political ideologies, and Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. The methodological starting point is two variants of analyses that are textual ones.