The means to political participation at the local level in Sweden are changing and this change is analyzed through a case study. The first aim is to explore the forms of public political participation in Swedish municipal Älvkarleby, namely public question time in local government, citizen motions and open meetings. A part of this is also to analyze he every day contact between citizens and representatives. The second aim concerns the reasons why politicians decide to support these means to participationThe empirical material consists mainly of semi structured interviews with local politicians, civil servants, participating citizens and local press. Official documents such as public minutes are also used in the process of creating an image of local participation.Local political participation is found to be limited but yet having the potential to strengthen democracy, provided that public decision-makers are open to a dialogue with the participants.Using Kjell Arne Røvik's theories of organisational change, the changes in local democracy can be explained as being partly rational, partly symbolic and partly identity shaping political decisions..

The purpose of this graduate work is to seek knowledge about how children?s right to participation and influence is interpreted and understood in a specific context and also to examine how this right can be conditioned and shaped by the pedagogical practice of early childhood education.The focus of this study has been to examine the arguments and attitudes towards the right to participation and influence as a pedagogical practice as it is understood in early childhood education. Additionally, I have been interested in studying the affordances and restrictions that early childhood educators experience when dealing with children´s right to participation and influence.The platform used for data collection is Facebook and the informants recruited were active participants in forums regarding democracy in preschool education. In the second phase of the study I conducted online focus groups with these participants.For the analysis of the material I have adopted a poststructuralist perspective, starting from Jaques Derridas philosophical texts and use of deconstruction.The results show the complexity in early childhood education´s democratic mission. What becomes clear is the importance for the teachers to adopting an open, ethical and democratic approach in order to make children´s right to participation and genuine influence possible in the everyday reality of early childhood education. .

In 1974 the three municipalities of Åsele, Dorotea and Fredrika were amalgamated despite of hunger strikes, mass protests and a serious threat of violence. But after six years the marriage shattered as Dorotea left the other two after years of continued struggle. In 2005 the idea of an amalgamation of Åsele, Dorotea and Vilhelmina municipalities was brought to life by an older and ever declining population.By creating a democratic ideal type consisting of the three variables ? legitimacy, participation and identity ? this study assesses what impact an amalgamation of the three municipalities might have on local democracy.Combining a qualitative and a quantitative approach this study concludes that amalgamating the municipalities today could create a democratic unit lacking legitimacy, having a weak identity and impeding participation. But the study also brings forth that the impact of an amalgamation upon the variables of the ideal type as defined is not written in stone.

This study is case study of political participation among the Kani tribe from Kuttichal grama panchayat in the Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala, India. The study is based on the collected data of 117 people of the Kani tribe living in four different settlements: Pankavu, Mangode-Valippara, Chonampara and Kaithode. The aim of the study is to examine the impact on political participation by different factors, which is done by the use of the quantitative method of cross tables. The study confirms previous studies in its conclusion that high status individuals, defined in terms of education and economic standard, are the group of the highest political participation, when this is defined as being involved in political work and holding a party membership. On the local political scene however, where political participation consists of participation in local assemblies and voluntary work, the impact of the examined variables are very limited.

The development that the Swedish society has experienced during the last four decades and the higher part of the population coming from foreign countries calls for a more intensive research on the situation of these groups. The purpose of this study is to find explanations of the differences in the share of immigrant politicians in Linköping and Norrköping. The starting point of the study is a model of factors assumed to affect the representation of immigrants in the municipality assemblies. The immigrant composition, the municipality organization and the view of democracy of the politicians, are all assumed to affect the civic participation. The civic participation is then assumed to affect the representation of immigrants in the municipality.

On the 17th of January 2002 the Swedish government presented a bill to theSwedish parliament, proposing ways of strengthening the Swedish democracythrough reforms for increased elements of participatory democracy. A publicreport on the state of the Swedish democracy had been released two years earlierwith similar enthusiasm for participatory democracy. However, the participatoryideals of these two documents were strongly criticised by a group of scholars.The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the arguments articulatedbetween the years 2000 and 2002 by the actors mentioned above, and to examinetheir relation to arguments concerning political participation, articulated bythinkers from previous times. By classifying the arguments into different groupsdepending on their content I find that both parties in the Swedish argumentationfocus on the effects of participatory democracy on political equality, on theefficiency of the political decision-making and the quality of the decisions beingmade, and finally on the personal character of the citizens. Among the argumentsarticulated by thinkers from previous times, similarities with the Swedishargumentation can be seen as well as important differences.

Partly as a reaction to a perceived crisis in contemporary democracy, the nineties witnessed an upsurge in different forms of citizens? fora, dedicated to the promotion of increased participation by the citizen in the political process. Youth councils are a special point in case as they entail the general characteristics of a deliberative forum, with an emphasis on political learning. This study aims to undertake an evaluation of a regional youth council in the region of Skåne in the south of Sweden. Through qualitative analysis, the study aims to portray the origin, purposes and consequences of such a forum.

In an effort to strengthen democracy in the union, the EU in 2005 took a new approach to communications policy to reach out to the citizens. The strategic document "Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate" was accompanied by two other documents, and the three of them were the core of this policy. Both democracy and communications work means at EU level a higher complexity than in the nation-state arena. Objective of this study is to examine how the implementation of Plan D has turned out in a democracy renewal perspective. To achieve that answers are sought to questions concerning the goals of Plan D, how they are still present today, what happened in practice regarding the efforts that are highlighted, and how the substance of the activities can be judged from a democratic theory perspective.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent municipalities in Sweden use democratic innovations to include citizens in the decision making process. Along there are three research questions:? What different forms of democracy innovations are Swedish municipalities applying in order to increase the civic participation between elections and what forms are dominant?? What potential influence in decision-making are citizens getting through these democratic innovations based on the results?? Based on the results ? in what ways is the democracy innovations used in municipalities challenging representative democracy? The method used to fulfill the purpose and answer the research questions is a web survey including 287 of 290 (in total) municipal websites. The theoretic framework includes a model which is called ?Smith?s ladder of participation? and is influenced by the research of Graham Smith and Sherry Arnstein.

The aim of our research in this study, which has a qualitative attempt, is to investigate participation concerning to a few co-workers in the old-age care. The co-workers experience of participation and their definition of participation, and how participation is related to our different themes. Our themes are the present and wanted assumptions, to make participation possible. Further more does this study discuss participation in relation to the themes communication, competence education and to physical and psychic health. The method we used was primary semi-structured interviews and some observations.

This essay tries to explain how Swedish donor organisations are working with democracy in foreign aid. Three case studies of Sida, LO-TCO Biståndsnämnd and Rädda Barnen aims to give an overview of Swedish donor organisations, their work with democracy aid, evaluation and the problems with foreign aid. With Carothers theory of democracy aiding I analyse the success of Swedish democracy promotion, how civil society contributes to democratizaion and how democracy is measured.I find that Swedish democracy aid overall is successful due to a wider perspective of the term democracy. When democracy involves human rights it gives the donor a possibility to work with democracy promotion in a more extensive area and especially in the civil society. The essay stresses the importance of being subjective when evaluating and that one have to focus on the definition of democracy in each specific case.

Democracy is said to uphold the dearest values and be the most moral system. But it cannot be characterized as a rigid "syste" but a continuously changing political framework, under which aims and values can be fulfilled - and replaced.The increasingly diverse and ever-changing environment of contemporary democracies forces change upon the systems' natural evolution, which makes their future features uncertain and unforeseeable. A powerful change-force doctrine does however claim change is mainly (or merely) caused by the power of ideas; the elite power over ideas can thus provide a natural foundation for the analysis of the direction of development for democracy. This study aims to provide such a foundation by reconstructing empirical and normative descriptions of democracy at two certain points in time, following extensive government studies.As a tool for analysis, this study identifies values of substantial and procedural character central to democracy theory and discourse. It further creates ideal types of democracy based on these values, to which the nature of democracy is measured.

The question of direct citizen participation in politics and administration is a contestable one. Its proponents claim that it has positive consequences even for the more "traditional", representative democracy, since participation leads to an increased political knowledge and increased political interest, and thus creates a revitalised democracy. Critical voices have however been raised to the validity of this claim. Critics have also pointed out direct participation as problematic, because it leads to problems of political inequality: a difference of political influence between ? on the one hand, the citizens participating directly and those that restrict their political participation to voting, and ? on the one the other hand ? between the institutions, for example schools, that employ, and don?t employ this method of direct citizen influence.In this essay, these two points of criticisms are tested in the context of user-boards in elementary and secondary schools.

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.

AbstractIn the paper, democracy's development and change are studied in Swedish textbooks related to social science. The study?s starting point is that the picture of democracy provided to students has changed over time. The study aims to see how the view on democracy has altered in Swedish textbooks in social science. In order to examine this, I have studied seven textbooks, from 1945 to 2006, in social science.