This essay studies the practice of both the political and the administrative leadership at the municipal level from the point of view of the politicians and the chief officers leadership role, and the relationship between politicians and administrators. I discuss and analyse how politicians and senior officials practice leadership, differences or similarities and if their practice of leadership raises any challenges in a democratic framework at the municipal level. I conducted interviews with the municipal political leader and the head of administration at the municipal level in Karlshamn and Sölvesborg. In the analysis I discuss communication as a leadership process which highlights ?enabling elements? and potentials of the leadership process.

The work with Agenda 21 resulted in a larger focus on local participation and deliberation. The Swedish implementation of Agenda 21 is a result of these local governments´ political agendas and policies.The purpose with this paper is to examine the relationship between the citizen and the local government. It focuses on three theories of citizenship and how the view of "the environmental aware citizen?; in the local government?s municipalities policies differ and from which theory of citizenship do they come from.The analysis is of a valuing and comparing nature. The municipalities´ web pages have been the main source to generate an understanding of their view on the normative environmental work.

During the autumn of 2008 I obtained office experience by working at the local government of Örnsköldsvik. I started working on the district green plan of the green structure and that led to the work of this exam paper. The purpose of this exam paper has been to define some standpoints for the green structure of the local government district of Örnsköldsvik. I have used both a larger and a smaller scale to obtain a wide a perspective as possible of the green structure. The larger scale gives an overall view of the whole municipality while the smaller scale is found in the study of the two local areas Centrum and Domsjö. For the local government planning to be able to obtain an agreeable level of verdure to the residents it is necessary that the green structure is brought up on the agenda.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how the local governments have implanted the new public health policy, which Sweden adopted in April 2003. The new health policy stakes out a new direction for national public health policy. Instead of focusing on diseases the new public health policy focus in factors that determine health.Important factors to study are the role of central steering from the central government. The method used is a case study of three Swedish local governments. The main material used is interviews and different policy documents within the area of public health.The conclusion of the study shows that the local governments are fairly satisfied with the steering of public health policy by the central government.

Following essay discusses the possibilities of using a gender perspective when studying local governance within a Swedish context. Governance is an international concept used to describe a more lose, informal and network based way of doing politics The main purpose for conducting this essay is that traditional theoretical frameworks used in the study of local politics are not enough to fully conceptualize the complexity of our changing political environment.After a broad summing up of what had been done in the recent decades within Swedish political science on the topic of local politics and gender I came to the conclusion that so far nothing had been written on governance. The next step was therefore to conduct a pilot study to cover the subject matter of governance and gender. The study was based upon interviews with five female politicians in Malmoe city.Results showed that governance, in terms of informal networks did exist, and had influence over the local politics. Some of the networks were male dominated.

Although being recognized as holding great cultural-historical significance by local officials, numerous parts of the functionalistic development along Friggagatan became demolished in 2008.This bachelor thesis have surveyed how the planning process proceeded through various municipal committees, and moreover, how different interest groups gathered around certain discursive attitudes. As a consequence of various paradigm shifts in society, e.g. that local government gradually are depending on private economic initiatives, there are to some extent a fear among politicians that cultural-historical demands can risk economic growth.Nevertheless, a building or a development are in fact bearing different value-perspectives, such as economic, functional and cultural-historical. Due to the fact that the heritage-sector has limited resources, in combination with sometimes vaguely and obsolete conservation documents, the sector have difficulties of responding common economic arguments, which leads that the real estate-owner gets total interpretative prerogative.However, despite a sometimes suspicious political attitude towards an improved conservation document, e.g. with continuously updates concerning a building?s technical and economic status, there are some political initiatives working towards it..

Based on different integration policies, we aim to examine how five municipalities in Stockholm County are working to promote integration at a local level with focus on voter participation and to some extent, representativeness among foreign-born. Statistics provided by SCB shows that foreign-born tends to vote to a lesser extent than those born in Sweden. Further, we aim to examine the implementation of two policy documents established at a national level concerning integration in contrast to policy documents established at a local level in each different municipality. Further, we aim to examine summaries of actions taken in response to the local integration programs, as well as personal interviews. Each municipality will be considered separately, but we thus seek to make a comparative study.

The Swedish public inquiries and most of the political science advocate reforms in the spirit of participatory democracy to strengthen the democracy. Although it is striking how limited and narrow the scientific documentation is in analysing the effects of participatory democratic reforms. Still, many of the local governments in Sweden are reshaping their organisations according to the participatory democracy model. Is it a trend and a symbolic action or a veritable action of good-will of the politicians?The paper argues that the idea of participatory democracy has become popular and widely spread.

The purpose of this essay is to examine if there is any difference in the style of conversation between a municipal politician and a politician in parliament? In order to answer this question I have created two sub-questions that are more precise. The first question is: Are the municipal politicians more open to cooperate with politicians from other parties than the politicians from parliament? And the second question is: Is the rhetoric between the politicians in parliament different than the rhetoric between the municipal politicians?My study is a comparative case study with two different groups of politicians. With the help of a survey I have tried to examine if there are differences in the use of language in the daily work for the politicians.

The objective of this thesis was to investigate factors that influence local government implementation. The study is a comparative case study between two local governments in Sweden; Hässleholm and Landskrona. Primarily the thesis aimed to look at the conditions faced by those implementing a new government directive aimed at supporting women who face violence, and their children who bear witness, by focusing on three key aspects for successful implementation: Implementers level of understanding, knowledge and will to implement decisions. Material in the form of documents and 14 interviews with key actors in the two authorities constitute the empirical foundation of the analysis. According to the results, are the two local governments pretty equal in achieving their projectgoal but the local government of Hässleholm had better policy-making, policy-design and policy process.

The aim of this study is to explore if and how library managers market their competence in communication with local politicians. It is also our aim to find a definition of the competence of librarians. The report identifies and describes problems and possibilitieswith marketing of competence to politicians on the basis of one Swedish municipality's library managers. In order to fulfil this aim we have used a literature study on marketing, competence, the political process and the librarian profession. We have alsocarried out an empirical study where we interviewed ten library managers in onemunicipality, seven politicians in the same municipality and ten representatives for central professional organisations mainly in Sweden.The results are that most library managers don't market their competence because they don?t believe in marketing competence.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to study what place public libraries have in local politics, particularly from the point of view of the politicians. To answer this, I have interviewed politicians, participated as a silent observer of a public debate, and studied articles on library politics in newspapers and other press. The results show that politicians in general have a positive view of libraries and good co-operation with library professionals, and that they have a fairly up-to-date view of libraries. They are, however, less interested in library issues in general, and are often complacent with the way things are already running. The newspaper studies show that library issues are usually only discussed when a specific library is somehow in danger.

AbstractC-essay in political science by Anna BryntessonSupervisor: Michele MichelettiSpring 2006?Young municipality politicians - Why some young people become municipality politicians, how they think it is andwhat they think should be done to engage more young people in politics??The Swedish municipalities have problem with that they doesen´t have many politicians under 30 years. Many of the young people who become politicians drop out after a short while. The conclusion of this is that the Swedish municipalities have problems to engage young people in politics.The purpose of this essay is to study and try to find out what young people think about politics? This is done with personally interviews with 7 young municipality politicians from the municipality of Eda.The specific research questions are:? Who are they which became young municipality politicians?? What was the reason that they became politicians?? How do they look at municipality politics?? Which roll and function does the young people have as a municipality politician?? What do they think should be done to get more young people to engaged in politics and become a municipality politician?The young Eda politician is a girl living in a house in the country and she has middle education.

The aim of this essay is to investigate and evaluate the arguments made by municipal politicians in Ulricehamn, regarding the planned Knowledge and Culture Centre. A part from the search for these arguments, I also investigated the attitudes among politicians regarding municipal culture investments in general. I furthermore investigated whether any national, regional, or local culture-political strategies were important in the local debate. The time frame within which the local political culture debate was investigated was from 1997 until present time 2002. The investigation methods used were partly a study of official documents such as political protocols, two articles from the local newspaper, and a clean copy from a web chat, and partly a qualitative study I sent a question regarding the planned Culture Centre to every political party active in the Ulricehamn municipal assembly.

The purpose of this essay was to study the implementation of a policy document, which concerns questions of integration, in a municipality with an indirect government. I have especially focused on issues regarding how civil servants describe the usage of a specific policy document and to what extent their autonomy and the indirect government have had an impact on implementation, and to what extent signals from surrounding institutions have had an impact on the creation of the policy document. The study was based on qualitative interviews in groups, pairs and with single individuals with twenty-seven civil servants and politicians working with issues concerning the specific policy document.One of the conclusions of my study is that the reason for producing the document in the first place is that the municipality as an organization strives to acquire a sense of legitimacy. The intentions of the document have only partly been implemented by the civil servants and politicians, since the document is not used in their daily work. Here, their autonomy has played an important part, as the choice to not use the document is the servants' own.