The aim of this essay is to illustrate a fundamental question; what is a democracy allowed to do to protect itself from enemies? I´ve chosen to analyze the conflict between the two values; individual integrity and state´s security. The individual integrity refers to every person's right to have a protected sphere, and the stat´s security refers to its right to protect itself, and these two positions are often time incompatible. This conflict of value is shown in a normative analysis, where depending on which perspective or normative logic is seen as primate, it gives different conclusions to what a democracy should do to defend itself.To demonstrate how severe the threats are against the society, I choose to examine a specific part of the organized crime, the outlaw motorcycle gangs. They have a special position in affecting the legal system because they have an explicit aim to influence the judicial system with scaremongering and threats.

The purpose of this paper is to examine witch factors lays behind political decisions when reforming upper secondary school. Three major factors are used: political, economical and structural. These factors become visible by comparing the school reforms 1965 and the coming one in 2009. An analytical scheme is used to find the factors in the primary information. The study is based both political inquiries and on debate articles from newspapers and political papers.The results show that two factors are more visible than the third, and that is the ideological and structural.

During the last few years the countries in the African continent have experienced an enormous increase in female politicians on a national level. Rwanda is even the country with the highest number of female politicians in its parliament in the world. Despite this development in Africa, the quantitative research on women's political representation in the world has not yet paid attention to the situation there. Some of the surveys that have been done have even excluded countries that do not fit the homogeneous pattern ? which is precisely the problem with African countries ? for it to be possible to explain the situation with existing theories.The intention of this paper is therefore to, with all of the 53 African countries included in the study, examine whether the already existing explanatory factors regarding women's political representation also can be applied to an African context to explain the situation there.

The idea that I put forward in this thesis concerns the democratic system and the threat from discoursive impact on its core values. I focus my normative analysis on three of these democratic values: transparency, accountability and influence ? and what democratic problems the discoursive impact causes in conflict with them. I have used a critical discourse theory to define discourse and discoursive impact, by focusing on the process of discourse, rather than its nature. I deal with the political structure where I claim that the essential relation between citizen and politician is disrupted, due to lack of information and the imminent problems of the existing network society.

People are given better opportunities to participate in polity today. Democratic equality entails that all individuals are equal and therefore they should be included in the process of making the decisions. How can participation be defined and does it mean that having the possibility to participate means that people can influence the process of making the decisions in polity process?This paper focuses on participation and influence in polity and examine the relationship between having the possibility to participate and having the possibility to actually influence polity process on more local level. Therefore I have been examining the citizens? participation and influence in Helsingborg which is my case study.

This examination project is an investigation about the opinion and comprehension for political engagement of four young municipal politicians. The purpose with this project is to describe and understand the pronounced comprehension for political engagement. There is also an intention to investigate the educational in discussing political engagement with students in social studies at upper secondary school. The method that has been used is ?map of conceptions? because of its appropriate way to elucidate the comprehension and understanding of a certain subject. Those four young municipal politicians see political engagement as the will to improve the community. There is also an importance to have a large engagement in more areas than just one.

This thesis discusses the 2007 elections in Kenya, and its aftermath. The aim is to examine whether or not ethnicity played a major role in the outbreak of violence that followed the referendum. As well as different theories and discussions on ethnicity, I will also try to explain the course of events by using theories of increased civil violence during a democratic transition, and the fact that weak political institutions can cause violence. My conclusion is that ethnicity has played a part in the violence, but is too simple to blame the events following the election on just that. A number of different factors all contributed to the outbreak, but all to a different extent.

Social housing in Northern Europe and the importance of social and political consideration in planning. Focus of the essay lies on the "burning suburbs" of France, based on literature studies combined with a study visit to Les Minguettes outside of Lyon..

The Swedish society and welfare model are under constant changes anddevelopment. One of the core areas in this welfare model is the social policy. By analysing the changing role of the organizations in the civil society on a local level with a theoretical typology changes in the roles can be noted. These changes can with a model for ideal types raice questions about bigger changes concerning issues of legitimacy and accountablility. I uses qualitative method including interviews with actors on the local level, earlier reseach in the field and public documents.

The main purpose of this essay was to study whether niche parties that were represented in municipal councils in Sweden during the 2007-2010 term of office were politically relevant. Furthermore, factors that might facilitate political relevance for niche parties were studied. Political relevance was studied using two theoretical perspectives. The objective model of political relevance presents four categories of relevance based on the relations between political parties in a political assembly; governing parties, coalition parties, blackmail parties and isolated parties. The subjective model of political relevance relies on the party representatives? own judgments of the relevance of their parties.

Jina Mahsa Aminis d?d har uppm?rksammats ?ver hela v?rlden d?r omfattande manifestationer och reaktioner i den politiska v?rlden har n?lat fast kvinnors r?ttigheter p? den politiska tavlan. Denna studie unders?ker betydelsen av den feministiska protestr?relsen i Iran f?r svensk-iranska kvinnor genom att titta p? den komplexa fr?gan om kulturell identitet och dess p?verkan. Studien visar att kvinnornas erfarenheter av patriarkala strukturer och kulturella normer spelar en betydande roll i deras inst?llning till f?r?ndring och hur de f?rh?ller sig till sin kulturella identitet.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the Swedish model with attention to core values over time, as well as, explain recent changes. It examines changes of the social insurance system, with focus on political reforms in the unemployment insurance, health insurance and family policy, during the last two decades. The thesis is empirical but although a discourse amount political theories and normative conceptions.Conclusions are that the normative basis in the Swedish model contains general equally and uni-versally designed rights and consensus on growth and development as well as a strict focus on an employment oriented society. Important values have also been dialogue between actors as well as accountability, even if these facts appear to have declined in recent years.Relating to three leading theories in political philosophy - utilitarianism, Rawlsian communitarian-ism - explores the directions in later year political reforms. The results show that later years changes seem to go in relative strongly utilitarian direction.

This thesis deals with non-wanted political parties e.g. right wing populism. How should a democracy handle these opinions? So far these parties have been neglected and not even considered as real parties. By excluding them from the debate and the political arena, media and more established parties have seen them merely as a threat than as democratic parties.

In December 2004 an earthquake coursed waves that hit Thailand. Over 5000 people died, and Sweden was the tourist country that has been effected the worst. The catastrophe precipitated Sweden in crises and the demand became high for Swedish government to act. Swedes followed the development via media, why media became the crucial element for how the public perceived politicians? acting.

Tidigare forskning har visat att det finns kulturskillnader i det självbiografiska minnets uppbyggnad och att byte av socio-kulturell kontext kan påverka det självbiografiska minnet. Självbiografisk minnesspecificitet har dock inte tidigare studerats i ett kulturellt perspektiv. I denna studie jämfördes självbiografisk minnesspecificitet hos 19 iranier som migrerat till Sverige och 19 iranier i Iran. En variant av Autobiographical Memory Test användes, där hälften av ledorden var relaterade till iransk kultur och hälften var mer allmänna. Hälften av orden i vardera kategorin var positiva och hälften negativa.