This study is an examination of the stadium fever prevailing in Sweden. It is built stadiums in Sweden as never before. The high cost of these constructions end up in the end at the Swedish taxpayers. The study examines through the hedonic pricing of real estate how local residents value the new stadiums. The result indicates that local residents put a positive value in the costly and sumptuous buildings.

The Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party are two parties with different ideological background. The parties have different opinions in issues of public and private matters. The Social Democratic Party profiles it self, through the local and national party programs, as a party for solidarity and security. The Moderate Party, on the other hand, profiles it self through their programmes as a party with a possibility for the individual to shape his or her own life. Through a survey on members in the local government, and two key persons at national level, the view of municipal self-government has appeared.

According to the Conventions on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to make their voices heard and express their opinion in situations concerning them. With this paper the authors have chosen to explore social worker?s view?s on children?s participation and influence, and how these are manifested through the entire case process. The focus in this study has also been the positive and negative effects the children?s influence may have.To investigate this, a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews has been conducted.

The study aims to investigate student participation as a tool for democratic development in secondary school from a student perspective. Furthermore, students' perceptions of the school's work with student participation in formal and informal contexts are also investigated, with basis in the teaching structure. The results are based on interviews conducted with students who all attend the same class in their last year of high school. Subsequently, an analysis is made based mainly on three different theories: democracy, curricula and sociocultural theory. The result shows that students feel that they are able to practice student participation but the amount of influence they get differs between individuals depending on devotion and commitment.

AbstractThe aim of this study is to retrieve knowledge about how teachers in the preschool talk about children?s participation and influence in the work of pedagogical documentation, and what they think about children?s integrity associated whit it. I have used qualitative interview as method, and I have interviewed five teachers from four different preschools. The result from my study shows that the teachers don?t see so much of children?s participations and influence in the work of pedagogical documentation.

Welfare is every person's right. To create conditions for a good welfare it requires coordinated strategic interventions at national and local level. Efforts must be politically supported to be able to strengthen public health. Local welfare management is a measure used to control and monitor public health. The purpose of this study was to investigate local actors perceptions of collaboration in strategic public health efforts with local welfare management in a municipality in central Sweden.

The study consist of an investigation regarding the implementation of reassurance policing in Sweden and include a survey conducted among some of the local police offices in Stockholm County. The aim of the study is to investigate how the police officers working in the local polices offices experience the implementation of the local police offices and if the implementation of local the polices offices matches the police authority´s purpose with the project. The study uses the theoretical framework from political scientist Michael Lipsky calledStreet-level bureaucracy - Dilemmas of the individual in Public services which discuss the role of street-level bureaucrats and their influence in the implementation. Included in the study is also two different perspectives on governing in public sector called top-down perspective and bottom-up perspective. The findings of this paper shows that the police officers are in general positive towards the implementation and that there´s a duality among the police officers regarding the proximity to the citizens..

The purpose of this study was to explore young people's participation and experience of participation in child protection investigations. The study was conducted using qualitative methodology and is based on interviews with four adolescents aged 13-19 years old who have experience of child protection investigations. Our chosen method has made it possible for us get a deeper understanding of young people's own experiences of participation. In order to analyze the material we have used Shiers (2001) model of children's participation, symbolic interactionism, and some concepts relating to shame and pride.The results show that all adolescents have had the opportunity to be heard during the investigations, but it is different to what degree they feel that someone has listened to them.Two of the young people have been involved in their investigation, been listened to and have had impact on the decisions taken. The results indicate that it does not seem to be the external factors, such as how many meetings they have had, or what quality it was on the information, that matters if the social worker did not manage to convey to the young people that what they told was of any importance.

The term socken ? comparable to the English term parish ? refers to a historical geographical entity found in rural areas of Scandinavia. This entity presents a multi-layered understanding of the local rural area and is in this essay conceptualized as a place. The concept of place is central to geographic work but it is also a contested term ? discourses within the field of geography present different perspectives on place as a geographical concept and our understanding of it.The history of parishes goes centuries back.

In this thesis we calculate the Hawking mass numerically for surfaces in Kerr spacetime. The Hawking mass is a useful tool for proving the Penrose inequality and the result does not contradict the inequality. It also does not contradict the assumption that the Hawking mass should be monotonic for surfaces in Kerr spacetime. The Hawking mass is quasi-local and defined by the spin coefficents of Newman and Penrose, so first we give a discussion about quasi-local quantities and then a short description of the Newman-Penrose formalism..

The aim of this thesis is to explore the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Sweden and how the design may contribute to realize central democratic goods. The study records the different PB experiences in Sweden and focuses on one particular case, which is the only case that successfully qualifies as a genuine PB-process according to international standards and definitions. To examine this, the following questions are asked: which municipalities in Sweden have implemented Participatory Budgeting? How can the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting be described and to what extent does it enable the realization of central democratic goods? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the democratic goods inclusion, popular control, considered judgment and transparency? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the institutional goods of efficiency and transferability?The study is based on an institutional theory of democracy. The method used is a mixed method ideal type analysis that combines document analysis, surveys and interviews.

AbstractMatchmaking on an organisational level? about co-operation between municipal introduction-units and voluntary organisationsEssay in Political Science D, by Rebecka Johansson, spring 2006The aim of this study is to examine co-operation between municipal introduction-units, which work to integrate newly arrived immigrants and refuges, and voluntary organisations in Sweden. The essay is a comparative case study which examines three local authorities and the main questions are;- Do voluntary organisations constitute a functioning co-operation partner to the municipal introduction-units? Are there conditions for future co-operation?The answer to the questions is that there are no, or rarely any, co-operation between voluntary organisations and municipal introduction-units. It is difficult to judge whether there are conditions for future co-operation.

AbstractParticiapation from the citizens in a democratic society is one of the ground pilars for the function of the democratic society. The goal for the Swedish contemporary democracy is to complement the representative democracy with different kinds of participatory activities for the citizens. But is it working? The purpose of this essay is to exame the problems that might occur when the citizens participate in a wider extent than just voting. The focus is problems connected to the democratic value political equality.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.