In the end of the last century the interest for youth politics increased in Sweden. The causes for the increased interest were the more obvious youth politics questions and problems, for example the increased youth unemployment. In 1998 the government wrote down national goals and instructions for the youth politic work in a government bill (1998/99:115). This government bill describes how the youth politic work should be carried at a local level in the municipality.The purpose with this study is to investigate young people, in Värnamo kommun, view of their own situation. The study´s focus lies om three main concept; democracy, justice and faith in the future.

Young people?s political influence has been surveyed, studied and discussed several times in Sweden during the last decade. There is a fear among the politicians that the young people are not interested in politics, especially not in party politics. On the other hand there is, among the youngsters a feeling of invisibility, not being seen or heard or for that sake respected. There are a lot of formal possibilities for young people?s political influence, but there are not as many real possibilities or situations to actually practice these possibilities.

The aim of this paper is to describe the position of the Swedish welfare state within the shaping of a Swedish national identity. This is done through the study of Mångkulturåret 2006, and its rhetorical context. The point of departure is that history is formed continuously in current speech and a text analytical method has been used. Mångkulturåret was issued by the Department of Culture as an extended perspective of Cultural politics. The rhetoric used in the official document Agenda för Mångkultur is analyzed through a comparison with earlier official documents on the field of multiculturalism and integration.

People in refuge face states with a dilemma. This dilemma consists of a wish (or obligation) to help those who need a refuge, and at the same time consider domestic issues such as financial costs and security problems. Thus, there are two perspectives which are important to consider when refugee policies are made. The aim of this paper is to see which perspective the EU had when making their migration policies. The question asked is: which perspective is behind the making of European refugee policy?The theories realism and idealism are used to describe the conflicts in the making of European refugee policies.

The aim with this paper is to study how the integrational ideology of the Swedish parliaments party platforms, including the right wing Sverigedemokraterna, is formulated. The integration theories examined are assimilationism, multiculturalism, universalism and residualism. In turn these theories are simultaneously applied to the party platforms extracting explicit or implicit messages of the four former mentioned theories. The Swedish history of integration as well as immigration, which per capita is one of the highest in the European union, pinpoints the reason why this subject is due to further investigation. The results show that most of the parties contain traces of more than one integration theory, with the exception of primarily Sverigedemokraterna which focuses on assimilationism.

This study analyzes the political view of criminality and crime politics in three political parties in the Swedish parliament, Socialdemokraterna, Folkpartiet and Moderaterna. The study seeks to describe which kind of view these parties present on the criminality in our society. The material for this study is the ideologies that the parties descend from which are, socialism, liberalism and conservatism, the political programs of these three parties have also been studied as well as the parties proposals, political documents in the Swedish parliament. The current public debate shows that the crime politics is an attractive question and the parties may seem to have similar proposals on how to lower the criminality in our society. The theory that has been used to describe the results of the study is ?actors and structures? and the results are related to this theory as well as the theory has been used as an instrument to explain and sort the material and the results.The results of the study show that the parties are different in their views on criminality as a problem in our society.

The purpose of this thesis is to shed light on a present trend of professionalization in Swedish local environmental politics, which have recently seen a decline in active participation of the citizens in favor of an increased governmental regulation. With the aim to closer investigate this relatively new phenomenon, the paper is a qualitative single case-study of environmental policies in the Swedish municipality of Karlskrona. In this case, the municipality is obviously balancing between regarding the interests of the national level and the interests of its own citizens at the same time. This motivates the use of system-theory, and relates to the classical political paradox between participation and efficiency which is also a present theme in the paper.This text-analysis based on interviews with personnel and documents from the municipality shows a visible trend of professionalization in the local politics of the municipality of Karlskrona, from a large grade of participation and a strong bottom-up approach in the days of Agenda 21 to now being more strongly top-down defined by national environmental objectives and principally operated on a professional level..

This essay is about integration's discourses in newspapers. It compares four different newspapers with each other and it compares them also in a time perspective. The four different newspapers that the essay compares are Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter and Expressen. These are Swedish newspapers and they are distributed all over the country. The time perspective is a two months period, one month in the year 1994 and one month in the year 2002.

In his recent article Professor of International Affairs Charles Kupchan claims that Party Politics has become increasingly important for American Foreign Policy since the end of the Cold War. This assertion makes it valuable to assess how the substance of the Foreign Policy differs between the two American parties in various cases and if this difference is characterized by consistency or by change. In this thesis I examine these Party positions in relation to the European Security Policy.In order to examine this I compare the positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties? policy concerning both the European Defence Community (EDC) and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The purpose of this thesis is to examine the hypothesis that the Democratic Party to a higher extent than the Republican Party is more concerned to maintain good relations to Europe respectively EU.The results show that there are small indications that my hypothesis concerning the two parties is valid.

This is a study based on discourse theory in purpose to examine the border-politics ofthe EU. Since the EU step by step has developed into an area of free movement on capital, people and services, the external frontiers have been given prioritiy on the political scene. Development in recent years have put questions of foreign- and security politics on a supranational level, meaning that the EU-member states in a wider range now cooperate in these political areas.To handle the increasing ammount of (illegal) migration to the EU an independet agency, Frontex,was established 2005 in favour of coordinating the Member States in issues regarding bordersecurity. The focal point of this study is to critically examine the identity of Frontex by using Becks theory of risk combined with the theory of governmentality. By doing so I seek to highlight the relation between Frontex and the EU and also that of Frontex mission in relation to illegal immigration.

Aims: The aim of this study is to describe how youth?s political exclusion is constructed as asocial problem. This is done through a study of a project which aim is to engage young peoplein politics.Method and theory: By interviewing the project?s manager and developer as well as eightparticipating young people different constructions of the problem of youth political exclusionhas been analyzed using the social constructionist perspective on social problems.Findings: The dominant perspective found in the empirical material includes framing youngpeople?s lack of political knowledge and self-confidence as the reason for their politicalexclusion. Even though the Youth Board (ungdomsstyrelsen) in Sweden officially views allyoung people as a resource, when youth politics are implemented through projects, this is notthe view that young people meet.

This essay analyses text written by a gender equality movement critical of feminism. Themovement is active on the Internet and through this essay I would like to show the tensions in contemporary political debates on gender equality and feminism. 350 blogposts have been deconstructed through discourse theoretical method. In the analyses I have shown the discursive struggle that is going on within the movement in giving meaning to concepts as knowledge, society, gender, politics, feminism and gender equality. The movement is using the technical potential in blogs and common Internet forums tocreate a common political we.

Fältbiologer in Lund : A study on how the NGO Fältbiologerna has affected environmental politics in the municipality of LundThis paper examines, through interview and literary studies, if the environmental NGO Fältbiologerna has had any impact on the environmental politics of the municipality of Lund. The study is based on a case where Fältbiologerna were protesting against the establishment of two shopping centers near the outskirts of Lund.The study is inconclusive, but provides a few interesting questions for further studies in this subject..

Climate change is a phenomenon that know no boundaries. While focus on environment and climate change has become highly prioritized, nationalism has spread across Europe. Nationalism is by many considered to refuse action to combat climate change although some argue that nationalism could combat global climate change. Previous research on how nationalism is implemented in environment and climate politics has mainly focused on single parties. The thesis therefore aims to give a broad approach and compare how nationalism is used in environment and climate politics by analyzing 4 European parties with either ethnic or civic nationalism and different roles in their party system. With a qualitative content analysis on party programs and election manifestos the findings imply that parties use nationalism in the climate and environment discourse in a variety of ways.

This essay deals with the same task that utilitarians have tried to solve for a long time, what is happiness? In the eighteenth-century utilitarians suggested that happiness should be the base for social political decisions. But the lack of definition disposed so that GDP became the measurement of happiness, which proved to be wrong when the unhappiness continued to increase. More than two hundred years later scientists came up with a new definition of happiness and new ways to measure it. And during the last decade economists have taken the discussion to a higher level.So once again we?re dealing with the same old issue, if happiness ought to be the base of social political decisions.