Title: Facebook ? a false utopia?Authors: Anton Furuland & Dominic ChennayaPrincipal research question: Is the political polarization increasing on and through Facebook?Theoretical frame: Identification theory, selective exposure theory, spiral of silenceMethod/Material: Semi-structured interviews which provided our materialMain Results: Our research has shown a tendency for increased political polarization on Facebook.Number of pages: 58Course: Media and communication studies CDepartment: Department of informaticsUniversity: Uppsala UniversityPeriod: HT 2014Tutor: Amelie HössjerKeywords: Political polarization, Facebook, Political Debate, selective exposure, identification.

In recent years, the right-wing extremist site Avpixlat (?Unveiled?) and the anti-racist blog Inte rasist, men... (?Not a racist, but??, IRM) have established themselves as political actors and platforms for political discussion in Sweden. However, we know very little about them and their impact on democracy.

This study explores the notion of class and social inequality as expressed in the Swedish election campaign of 2006 and in the reception of the Swedish conservative party as a "worker's party". Inspired by Fairclough's critical discourse analysis I have carried through an investigation of the debate. My sources consists in a collection of articles, mainly leader columns and contributions to the debate, from a selected number of Swedish newspapers.I found that an explicit discussion about class, or use of the concept as such, was largely absent. In cases where the concept occurred it was often used in a purely descriptive sense or dismissed as outdated. Furthermore, I have drawn the conclusion that the traditional understanding of class is being challenged by a discourse which aims at establishing a new understanding of social inequality as lack of paid work.I take my point of departure in the belief that class continues to be one of the most important bases of social inequality.

Although Sweden has democracy implemented in its Constitution, because of being a monarchy, it has a non-elected Head of State. The purpose of this thesis is on the one hand to show if it is possible to normatively legitimate the Swedish monarchy and on the other hand to display if and how the three biggest Swedish newspapers Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter and Expressen justify monarchy by making a content-oriented analysis of their coverage of King Carl XVI Gustaf's political statement during his state visit in Brunei 2004.By using consequentialism and deontology as perspectives I will show that it overall is not possible to normatively justify the Swedish monarchy compared to a Swedish republic with an elected Head of State. This is mainly because democracy is implemented in the Swedish Constitution. In all three newspapers there is only little debate on the Constitution. Most commonly journalists criticize the King's statement but not monarchy as an institution.

This essay examines the public debate concerning the unemployment of Sweden just before the general election 2005. Its main purpose is to analyse what lies behind the huge differences in statistics, as presented by the two leading factions in the debate. It concludes that these differences are foremost a problem of semantics, and that although the two factions have statistical proof of their claims, it is their use of terminology that is in fact their main weapon in the debate.The key word here is the swedish word for employment ? sysselsättning ? which the two facitons use in entirely different ways, creating a lot of possabilities for interpretation. This has caused a type of debate which is actually about the reinterpretation this word, and those who are to be included in the statistics as being ?sysselsatt?, therefore, it is semantics that affects the number of unemployed people in the statistics..

New political parties are increasing as phenomena in Swedish politics. Some of these parties have gained much attention in the media, and recent examples are Junilistan, Feministiskt initiativ and Sjukvårdspartiet. Media plays an important role for political parties as it is a way for the parties to communicate with the citizens. Therefore this essay examines how these three new parties have been pictured in media lately, and with what arguments they are discussed. This is done by argument analysis of editorials in five Swedish newspapers.

This thesis highlights the complex relationship between social movements and the mass media. The new social movements really have to struggle to get access to the media sphere, often enforced to use spectacular media strategies, and at the same time maintain their political messages. This struggle gives us reason to question the liberal notion of the media as a neutral arena for political communication and debate. In fact we argue that the media industry should be seen as a powerful actor and that the mass media serves to maintain and enforce an ideology that serves the political and economic elites in the liberal capitalist democracy. The Social movements that seek to question these elites and present an alternative, as they did during the EU-meeting in Gothenburg 2001, quite clearly gets far from neutral media image of the political actions taking place instead the are portrayed as violent or associated with violence and not presented as legitimate or believable political subjects..

When it comes to political representation, all over the world women almost always make up a minority of representatives in the legislative bodies. The Scandinavian countries in general and Sweden in particular have though been exceptions to this rule with, when compared to other countries, a rather high percentage of women in elected positions. This development took off in the seventies: during that decade the unit percentage of women in the Swedish Riksdag rose by double!The aim for this thesis is to analyse what underlying ideas influenced this advance. The focus is on three different female party federations, who are believed to have had a great impact on this increase of women politicians through their influence in their own mother parties. The federations analysed are the ones connected to the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party and the Liberal party.

In this thesis I examine the development and expansion of judicial power in Sweden. The concept of judicial review is defined and related to democratic theory, and the various forms of judicial review in use in Sweden are explained. The main focus is on the political and scientific discussion concerning judicial review since the mid 1970s. It is shown that judicial review so far has been used only to a limited extent and that the number of court cases has remained quite stable over time. The main cause of judicialization seems to be the supremacy of EU law following the Swedish EU membership in 1995 and the inclusion of the European Convention on Human Rights into Swedish law.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to describe and compare the debates regarding the public funded publishing company En bok för alla (EBFA). On two occasions, 1992 and 2007, the public funding was threatened, which lead to debates and protests. The funding was revoked in 2007. I want to examine if by studying a particular product of cultural policy, one can se tendencies to how the cultural policy in whole change over time.

The aim of this thesis is to study how Denmark and the Danish people has been represented in the Swedish press and which images of them that appears. For this purpose I make use of discourse analysis and discourse theory. By analysing three cases were the debate about the Danish migration policy has been scrutinized in Swedish newspapers I seek to discover different ways of looking at the world. The study concentrates on the descriptions made by journalists and others who contribute to the debate in the media. The results show an image of the Danes as a people reluctant to foreigners and restrictive in their politics.

"A discourse analysis of the debate on prostitution 1993-2011" The aim of this essay is to investigate how prostitution is constructed in the debate. The analysis is based off debate articles from four of the biggest Swedish news papers. Articles from two periods of time has been chosen, 1993-1999 and 2008-2011. The specific periods were selected because they revolve around the Swedish ban on the purchase of sexual services in 1999, and when it was evaluated in 2008. With a constructivist aim based on gender research, the themes and subject positions of the debate are explored via discourse analysis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the Swedish national student organizations attitudes towards school food and the school food debate between 1957-1982. The previous research on the subject maps the historical background and development of the school meal, but lacks a contemporary student perspective from the chosen time period, not least on a deeper and more political level. The theoretical starting points in the study concern organizations and their influence on public authorities as well as student influence. These theoretical frameworks are used to describe the conditions for the currently active national student organizations; Elevf?rbundet and SECO, in the political arena.

The aim of this thesis is to discuss and analyse the media debate about feminist self-defence, by pointing out the pros and the cons. The arguments in favour could be separated into three different parts: statistical arguments, psychological arguments and justice arguments. The counter arguments could also be separated into three parts: general arguments, violence-related arguments and gender-related arguments. In short, feminist self-defence is built on women's experiences of men's violence. It contains three different parts to help women avoid violence, threat of violence, insult and sexual harassment.

In this essay my aim is to examine how the term utanförskap is constructed and defined as a social problem in the public arena of the Swedish Parliament. The term utanförskap was widely used in the election-campaign prior to the Swedish Parliament election in the year 2006. The term, mainly articulated by the Right-wing Alliance, was used to describe indi-viduals and groups that were depicted as being outside the Swedish society. In the Political Debate, work and benefit dependency were constructed as binary opposites, with the latter describing the individuals in utanförskap. Translated to English the term utanförskap would be something like ?the state of being outside? or ?outsidership?.