AbstractThe political parties in Sweden are losing members. This is seen as a problem because the political parties are the base and the recruiting ground for members to decision-making bodies. Social movements are seen as a place where people with a modest background could express their opinions and also learn the political process. These movements have also lost members during the last decades and this could seriously affect the representation of lower social groups among the decision-makers. This essay emanates from Robert D.

Sweden's school voucher reform has made the Swedish school system into one of the world's most liberalized. The debate concerning the ownership of Swedish schools is intense and the Swedish Minister of Education is open to restricting private equity owned companies from running schools. Interestingly, fewer calls are heard for restricting smaller profit-driven companies from owning schools. This essay aims to examine whether or not the quality of education provided by an individual school changes if it is acquired by a large private equity owned school group. This is done by conducting a comparative study on four independent schools recently acquired by AcadeMedia, Sweden's biggest private equity owned school group.

Taiwan has over the past thirty years experienced a substantial political transformation. Being ruled by Chinese nationalists since World War II, Taiwan started its democratic transition in the late eighties. The new democratic system did not only provide people with freedom to vote, it also marked the beginning of a search for a new national identity. Based on the international theory of constructivism, this paper defines and studies the Taiwanese people?s progression away from a dominant Chinese national identity towards a uniquely defined Taiwanese identity.

Aim: The nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, raised global criticism against nuclear power. In Sweden, the criticism has not been very visible and the government now allows a renewal of the nuclear power plants. The purpose with the study is to have a closer look on how Swedes in position of power motivate their positive attitude to nuclear power and how they conduct themselves to each other and to their opponents. The rhetorical perspective will be in focus for the analysing.Method: Four different artifacts represented by Swedes in position of power having a positiveattitude to nuclear power were chosen. Three rhetorical theories (the rhetorical arena, stasis andethos, pathos and logos) were used with the research question in focus.Result & Conclusions: The analyses resulted in conclusions about the strategies used by the participants such as: the importance of contexts, meaning for example that the greenhouse effect legitimizes nuclear power as a source of energy with important benefits.

Organic agriculture is financially promoted in Sweden by special environmental support and as consumers we are all encouraged to buy organic food. At the same time scholars at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences claim that organic farming does not provide any environmental benefits. The main criticism is that organic farming has lower yields than conventional, which means that more land is needed to produce the same amount of food as in conventional farming, leading to deforestation and loss of biodiversity. As for climate change, the critics claim that the significantly higher productivity in conventional crop production compared to organic, releases surplus land, which could be used for bio-fuel production and thereby replace the fossil fuels. The critics also claim that organic farming causes higher nutrient leaching than conventional.

Can we harm future people? According to our commonly used contractarian theories, it seems we cannot. This is because our actions of today not only influence what they are supposed to influence, but also who mates with whom and when, and thus which particular persons will ever live in the future. Had we not performed a particular action, the future people born as a result of that same action, would not have been born. It therefore seems they cannot reasonably reject our actions.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, more than fifteen revolutionary yearshave passed. Estonia and Latvia have undergone a change from communist statesto members of the European Union. As in so many other post-communist statescorruption has been a problem. However, Estonia has since the independence hada lower degree of corruption than the neighbour country Latvia. The main purposeof this thesis is to explain why so.

In the political world of today the discussion of Just wars are very present, since the international law and the UN Charter provides certain rules about when it is justified to go to war (jus ad bellum) and how a justified war should be conducted (jus im bello). The discussion about jus ad bellum and jus im bello derives from the theory of Just war. Both in international law and the Just war theory, focus is on interstate wars were the actors are two sovereign states. Since the end of the Cold War there has however been a change in the way wars are conducted. From interstate to intrastate warfare, where the government in most cases no longer has the monopoly over the warfare.According to these facts, my conclusion is that the Just war theory has to expand and incorporate a focus on the human rights in order to be able to meet the new standards of the new wars.

Background:It is always fascinating to observe the events that affect the stock market, especially as the numbers of influencing factors are so many and various. Political elections are important events in society and affect the corporate environment in different ways depending on which political party that is in power. This brings up the question of whether political elections are important enough to affect the stock market; and it is this question we intend to analyse in this paper.Purpose:The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether political elections affect the stock market and to discuss the reasons for any possible affect that might be found.Procedure:An appropriate and thoroughly tested method to investigate if an event affects the stock market or not, is to do an event study. Subsequently we chose to do an event study on whether the Swedish general elections in 2002 and 2006 affected the Stockholm Stock Exchange. In order to give the analysis more depth we have also chosen to interview people with knowledge of the stock market.

This essay is about democracy and how a democracy index can be used as a tool to illustratethe gap between reality and ideal. The purpose of this study can be expressed by two researchquestions: Does the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) democracy index illustrate thedistance between reality and the ideal of democracy presented by Dahl? and Can the EIU'sdemocracy index be modified by a) internal adjustments and b) using the variables includedin World Economic Forum?s (WEF) equality index?By using a combination of theories (Dahl?s theory of democracy, Rawls theory of justice andchosen theories critical to liberal democracy) as an analytical framework the following twoquestions have been answered:1) Which of the variables included in the EIU's democracy index have the potential to capturethe level of political equality?2) Which of the variables included in the WEF?s equality index have the potential to capturethe degree of political equality?By using a quantitative method the study?s third and last question has been answered:3) How strong is the rank correlation between the EIU?s democracy index and the WEF?sequality index, that is; how strong is the rank correlation coefficient (rho)?The data presented by the WEF?s equality index indicate that women are systematicallydiscriminated against as a group. From a democratic perspective the EIU may need tomeasure inequalities at a group level in order to capture the lack of political equality betweenindividuals. By reformulating some of the EIU?s variables, by revising the EIU?s point systemand by using the variables included in the WEF's equality index to extend EIU?s democracyindex, the chances of capturing the gap between reality and the ideal of democracy presentedby Dahl would likely increase..

The development aid from Sweden to developing countries is a activity thatinvolves a great deal of monetary founds as well as an opportunity to influence the environmental situation in a partner country. It´s also an opportunity to promote Sweden's values in a field like the environment, setting a good example is important. This thesis aims to evaluate Sida´s environmental policy and find out if there in fact is a Environmental Policy Integration Policy (EPI) taking place. EPI is a policyimplementation theory that emphasise the importance of the total integration of the environmental in the organisation as a whole. To identify this I will use a theoretical framework of indicators invented by William M.

This thesis examines the democracy theories that can be found in the internet websites of Region Skåne and Stockholm county council. Within the framework of deliberative democracy, participatory democracy and electoral democracy, the author tries to distinguish democratic aspects by empirically studying these websites and their communicative effect on the internet users.This research shows that Region Skåne is slightly better in implementing democratic aspects at their home page, which is probably due to an active work with these issues carried out by the politicians and the report on the democratic development from 2004. However, a great deal of work regarding democracy and the possibility of civic participation in the decision- making process is still to be done.The problems and challenges in using internet as a democratic tool shows that citizens run a risk of being neglected, due to their uneven participation in using internet in daily life. The conclusion of this thesis is that the politicians have to make an active choice in deciding to what extent the internet is allowed to be used when it comes to developing democracy. This work has to be done in cooperation with political scientists and IT experts, in order to assure a correct democratic model..

The aim of this paper is to examine how the press describes the public and private role of the Swedish monarch in texts that report about the biography Carl XVI Gustaf ? den motvillige monarken (Sjöberg et al. 2010) when it is published in November 2010. The examined period ranges between the days just before the release and a fortnight after. The analysis is limited to standard Swedish papers: a daily, Svenska Dagbladet, and an evening paper, Expressen.Questions asked in the study are: In what ways do the analysed texts raise a discussion about the monarchy?s importance or function in the society of today, that is a public debate on the monarchy? To what extension are status symbols used in the constructing of royalty, that is what Jürgen Habermas (2003) describes as representative publicity? What similarities and differences are found when comparing the news articles in the daily and in the evening paper?The method used to answer the aim and questions is the critical discourse analysis, as Norman Fairclough (1995) describes it, and the theoretical perspective of the essay is Jürgen Habermas? (2003) theory about the bourgeois public sphere.The result shows that the news articles in the daily unsurprisingly construct only a public who wants to debate on the monarchy.

In this thesis we have tried to show the problems that the categorisation of ?norrlänningar? generates. We have also tried to describe what the stereotypes of ?norrlänningar? are by examining what people say on web logs. The method we have used to find the stereotypes in our empirical material is the discourse analyse.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how the literature criticism are in the Swedish media in the reception of the novel Mosquitoes and tigers from 2007 written by the Swedish author Maja Lundgren. A second aim is to examine how master suppression techniques have been used by the literature critics in the newspaper debate. This qualitative study is based upon a total of 52 articles and reviews from five big Swedish newspapers. The theoretical approach, literature criticism, mainly originates from the Swedish professor in Literature Science Tomas Forser and the literature scholar Gunnar Hansson.