The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the ways in which culture and cultural policy are being articulated in the process of Lund's application to become Sweden's European Cultural Capital of 2014.I have used Dorte Skot-Hansen's three cultural political rationalities: the humanistic-, the sociological- and the instrumental rationality, as well as and Jenny Johannisson's extension of those into three cultural-political discourses, as sensitizing concepts in my analysis. The questions raised are: How are the three rationalities/discourses articulated in the chosen central documents and in the process surrounding them? Which themes and arguments dominate the chosen documents?The main objects of my study have been four texts that have been produced in the applicationprocess: a Prestudy, a Plan of action, a Broschure and a Cultural policy. Along with them local political protocols, newspaper articles and other related material have been used. The research method applied was a qualitative eclectical textual analysis with emphasis on the content and on tracing the way the rationalities were expressed in the material.The rationalities were all found to be articulated in the four texts.

The essay?s main focus has been to investigate and analyze the political actions behind the 2015?s grade compromise; an agreement to introduce grades from the fourth year in primary school. Through a game-theory analysis, mainly based in Leif Lewin?s and Jörgen Herman's research on rationality in politics, this study examined the grade debate  during a fifteen year period. The primary task has thereby been to explain the grade compromise through game-theory.

Age is one of two new discriminatory grounds in Swedish law. EU took official position against age discrimination by means of Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation. From January the 1st 2009 it is, by Diskrimineringslag (2008:567), illegal in Sweden to discriminate anyone based on age. The law covers all age groups and is applicable to various fields in society. Age differ from other discriminatory grounds since everyone has an age.

Croatia became an independent country 1991 and has since then strived to reach a democracy level, which can lead to membership of the European Union. The purpose of this essay is on the basis of consolidate democratic perspective to illustrate Croatia?s democratic development.In order to fulfil the aim, I have applied a qualitative text analysis technique. Through analysis of books and documents, data was collected to accommodate a valid result. I have used consolidated democracy, with its five areas (political, civil, economic, legal and bureaucratic), as my theoretical framework to the data, to provide answers and develop an analysis.The conclusions show that the consolidate democracy in Croatia has developed a lot since the independence, and Croatia is on its good way to turn into a democratic state like other West-European countries.

AbstractCities are once again becoming the locus of economic, social and political processes. The effect of these processes on the city is two-fold: one one hand they threaten to fragment and dislocate the city and the actors within them, on the other hand they give actors within cities new opportunities to react and mobilize resources towards different strategies of integration. The latter gives rise to what Patrick Le Galès calls the collective actor-city. The aim of this thesis is to explore the notion of the city as a collective actor in a swedish context by utilizing Le Galès theory of european cities as collective actors in an abductive case study on the city of Malmoe. By utilizing Le Galès five dimensions that make up a collective actor I analyze interviews conducted with city officals aswell as documents produced from the city wide plan of action Welfare for everybody.

This thesis, drawing from several empirical investigations, reaches the conclusion that there seems to be a positive correlation between the level of democracy and the level of state capacity in Latin American countries. This correlation is explained by a hypothesis derived from Rational Choice theory. With some important caveats, this conclusion is then applied to the discussion about democracy as a form of government. Within democracy, the thesis also offers an insight into different electoral systems and its possible implications, mostly on a theoretical level. The thesis only exists in swedish as of yet..

This paper investigates how students in the humanities in four universities in Sweden reflect on their education and the current view on the humanities as an education and a science. I want to investigate what impact the past few years public debate about the humanities have had on the students. What kind of beliefs and identities do the students of the humanities form and how do they discuss the universities, the choices they made in life and how do they feel about the future.This study is based on interviews with seventeen students in Sweden from four different universities. The research is also based upon a report that The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) published in 2011 and the debate following that report. I have also made participant observations on the four universities to make a broader description for the reader.

This paper deals with institutional and structural factors' influence on democratic transition in limited multiparty regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Comparing the cases Kenya and Tanzania, of which the former has made a transition to democracy and the latter has not, this paper reaches the conclusion that political traditions, the coalescing of the opposition, and the elites ability to learn from the electoral process is essential for a transition to democracy. In the specific cases, the harshness of the Moi regime and the Tanzanian vision of national unity may possibly carry some explanatory power, alongside the pressure from international actors.These results have been reached through the application of a comparative case study, where democratic transition constitutes the dependent variable. It should be noted that a harsh definition of the term transition has been applied, according to which the incumbents actual loss of an election is a necessary indicator for transition. However, the Freedom House and Polity scores have been brought up as complement of this definition.

The purpose of this thesis is to present a number of examples of how the debate concerning same-sex marriages in Sweden was conducted in religious media between the year of 2005 and May 1st 2009. I intend to examine if and how these debate articles can be descibes as examples of religion taking part in the public sphere according to José Casanovas theory of deprivitization and public religion (1994) and Jürgen Habermas theory of religion in the public sphere (1964, 1989, 2006, 2008). I will apply the theories to the material by using four criteria for public religion, based on Casanovas and Habermas two theories, designed by Marta Axner. I also intend to compare the arguments used in the material to the arguments found in Marta Axners dissertation Public Religions in Swedish Media (2013). To identify these arguments a textanalysis containing seven argumentschemes, designed by Gunnar Björnsson (1994), is applied.

The purpose of this study is to survey how the Sweden Democrats? success in the latest election to the Swedish parliament has changed teaching in social science. The main question is: in what way has the success of the Sweden Democrats influenced social science teaching? This leads to following sub-questions: 1) how do the social science teachers define the Sweden Democrats, 2) how do teachers relate to the Sweden Democrats in the classroom, 3) has there been a change in students? political opinions and 4) were there any discussions or proposals from the school administration which followed the parliamentary election of 2010? To answer these questions, interviews were made with four teachers. The main conclusion of this study is that the Sweden Democrats? success led to a simplification of teaching because phenomena and opinions that were previously taboo nowadays are normalized and thus have its place in the classroom.

This paper is a statistical examination about how the European Parliament views questions about equality between women and men. It focuses on how the members understand gender equality depending on ideological standpoint, nationality and gender. In other words, it focuses on whether the politicians have different point of views depending on which parliamentary political group they belong to, which member state they are coming from or which gender (man/woman) they have.Equality between women and men is a complex problem. This paper is concentrating on two questions; the problem about setting up a European gender institute and the problem about gender mainstreaming.The examination, which is a statistical examination about how politicians were voting in both questions, shows that all variables, ideological standpoint, nationality and gender, are determining factors for their voting behaviour in questions about gender equality. Ideological standpoint is the most important variable, second in place is gender and the least important factor is nationality..

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

The hypocrisy of democracy is to help autocratic rulers to stay in power because it benefits their own country. This thesis examines how the United States of America justified their cooperation with the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the period of 1953-1979, until he was overthrown by his own people. This case-study doesn´t make general conclusions about the US foreign policy towards other countries except Iran.The theoretical starting point for the empirical analysis is the political dilemma of dirty hands. With the analytical instrument, constructed with a normative analysis about the concept of dirty hands, it´s possible to discover which ethical discipline the American presidents had to uphold to justify their actions.There are three different aspects of their cooperation which are lifted in this thesis. The first one is about the circumstances that made them begin their cooperation, the second regards the features of the cooperation.

AbstractTitle: What TV-glasses do you wear? A study in how party-political people decode the TVshow Scooby Doo (Vilka tv-glasögon har du? En studie i hur partipolitiskt aktiva personer tolkar tv-serien Scooby Doo)Number of pages: 47 (54 including enclosures)Author: Christopher LandstedtTutor: Amelie HössjerCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Autumn term 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The aim of this essay is to make a study in how party-political people, 18-25 years old, both female and male, decode the messages in the TV-show Scooby Doo from 1969. Do they decode the show differently because of their political view, their gender or, and their social background? Is there a pattern in the decoding or is it based on a more individual level?Material/Method: A qualitative method containing a total number of 16 individual interviews with young adults, 18-25 years old, half of them female, the other half male, were used. All of the participants are members of political youth parties/organizations, equally divided in left and right wing parties.

January 1, 1999, a new sex purchase law was introduced in Sweden, Lag (1998: 408). The law implies that in a sex trade a crime is committed only by the consumer in the sex trade. The majority of consumers in prostitution are men and the suppliers are women. When prostitution is problematized it's usually from the woman's point of view and the perspective of the man is often overlooked. The new law has shed light on the consumer and made the male more visible in the public debate.