As the 2010 Swedish election was closing in, there was a discussion about how the media represented the different party leaders in a differential and unfair manner. This study aims to identify if there were any differences in how four of these party leaders, Lars Ohly, Maud Olofsson, Fredrik Reinfeldt and Mona Sahlin were treated in four individual questioning sessions on Swedish television. Utilizing conversation analysis the study focuses on identifying differences in the usage of interruptions between the four different sessions. The study also analyzes the aggressiveness of the journalists? questioning and how they designed their questions in the four different sessions.

AbstractThe aim of this thesis is to analyse a proposition that was made by the Swedish liberal party in the election campaign in 2002. The proposition was part of an integration program and the main point was that to become a Swedish citizen you should do a test to prove your ability in Swedish. In this paper, I?ve been investigating the way that this proposition was presented and the reactions that it met among the Swedish people. In my work I have noticed that there are some specific arguments that were very powerful and which were the ones that attracted most people.

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

Internet är fullt av udda företeelser som ingen skulle känna till om det inte vore för att Internets tekniska uppbyggnad skapade en ?lika för alla?-miljö. 1998 fick svenska väljare möjlighet att kryssmarkera bredvid en kandidat om väljaren ansåg att partiet hade placerat denne för långt ner på partilistan. Detta i kombination med Internets potential för aktörer att göra sig hörda utan att det kostar några större summor skapar nya utrymmen i den svenska demokratin.I detta arbete tittas närmare på de politiker som blev invalda i riksdagen enbart tack vare personkryss i valet 2002. Jag har koncentrerat mig på deras webbnärvaro och utreder huruvida denna uppfyller demokratiska kriterier eller ej..

This essay examines the recent electoral success of the Sweden Democrats (SD) in the Swedish municipal election in 2006 and 2010. By using statistical methods it aims to explain which of three contradicting theoretical frameworks best can explain how a populist radical right party could penetrate one of the most stable party systems in the world. The theoretical approaches tested in this essay are: a demand-side, an external supply-side and an internal supply-side approach. By using theoretically anchored proxies to determine the effect of the contradicting theoretical approaches this essay concludes that the internal supply-side explanation measuring the local party organizational ability of the SD had the most substantial effect when it comes to explaining their recent electoral success in the Swedish municipalities, as opposed to a more commonly believed demand-side driven explanation..

The purpose of this thesis was to gain an understanding of how Swedish political parties gain knowledge of their voters. The assumptions taken in the thesis were that political parties are using same methods as businesses do to find interesting segments. To attain insight into the purpose of the thesis, two research questions were formulated: how are Swedish political parties obtaining insights in who their potential voters are? With the second question, an attempt is made to answer how the very same parties are using their knowledge about their voter segments. To find answers to those questions, personal interviews were performed with seven political parties.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the democratization process in Kurdistan on the basis of consolidation democracy with focus on arenas defined by Linz and Stepan (1997), namely economic, political, legal, civil society and arenas of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, I intend to explain Kurdistan?s road toward democratization in Kurdistan from 1991 until today, with a focus on the years 2003-2012. The main results are that Kurdistan has developed conditions that support a future consolidation of democracy. However, there are weaknesses in the economic situation, rule of law and the arena of bureaucracy.

Before the general election 2006 all of the Swedish parties represented in the Parliament held their political party conference. At each political party conference, the leader for respectively party held their opening speech, a speech that was covered by the press. This essay deals with how the press covers these speeches. Analysing how the different speeches were covered by the press, some tendencies regarding how the press report could be visualised. In this comparison the ?quantitative content analysis? was used.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and develop a useful theory of human behavior that recognizes the importance of our emotions. The new framework, called the theory of emotional choice, is developed by a holistic method in which results from the fields of psychology, sociology and (neuro-) biology are used to mutually support the conclusions. The theory is distilled into six preliminary points, which are based on the finding that we are not thinking as logical, rational and longsighted as is often assumed. Instead the regular human thinking is suggested to be shortsighted, intuitive and ruled by our emotions and our needs for generality, causality and normality.To demonstrate the usefulness of the new framework, it is used in an analysis of financial bubbles. Additionally, the fields of negotiation, election and ethics are suggested as potentially interesting to analyze with the new theory..

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

The study explores collective action in Sweden between 1980 to 1995 using time-series data from the European Protest and Coercion Database. In spite of severe hardship during the crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish strike-rates declined. However, contention merely shifted from workplaces into the streets; there was indeed a protest movement against austerity, as shown by a series of large demonstrations, and some riots, between 1989 and 1993. Further analysis indicates this movement faded as it was increasingly chanelled into the electoral campaign of the labor pary; having won the 1994 election, the organised labor movement no longer had an interest in sustaining the protest movement against austerity..

AbstractThe recruiting of lay judges to the district courts is managed by the political parties. Despite repeated efforts the parties do not succeed in recruiting lay judges that reflect the structure of the inhabitants. Why not? This is the fundamental issue of this essay.This study is a multiple case study of two parties with different success in their recruiting work. The purpose is to study the process of nomination regarding lay judges at the district courts, at the latest election (2006).

After the last election Sweden has got a government that claims to be feminist. This thesis discusses whether the change of labels has also brought along policy formulated in a feminist way, arguing that the way policy is expressed affects how people see a certain problem. Three policy proposals are analysed, and in only one case the government seems to have been influenced by feminist ideas. The other proposals partly support claims made by new institutionalism that norms and routines in an organisation work to resist policy change, but also shows that feminist ideas are resisted more actively. The fact that so called policy entrepreneurs was present in the policy process at a certain period in time, probably counts for one explanation to the exceptional policy.

America finds itself divided in the midst of strict abortion laws and a contentious presidential election. This era of polarization, raises the question of whether such a great division has permeated through to the U.S Supreme Court. This paper uses two dominant theories of legitimacy; traditional and ideological, respectively, to analyze and compare this issue. The theories are compared empirically by investigating the level of public trust across opposing political affiliations. Unlike most previous research, the results suggest that variation in trust aligns with the ideological distance to the Court between democratic and republican voters. Trust is also found to be dependent on whether the electorate agrees with the decisions of the court or not.

Studies have found that the applicability of commercial marketing strategies within politics have increased in recent years as a result of a rising number of swing voters. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the commercial theory of incongruent information in political marketing in Sweden. Subsequently, an experiment with 742 participants was conducted, testing the effects of congruent and incongruent ad messages for two established Swedish parties. The effect of ad message choice on several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as awareness, credibility, attitude, conviction and voting intentions was analyzed. The results showed that incongruent information effectively increases attitude, conviction and voting intention for voters who decide on the election day what party to vote for.