This thesis analyses the 2005 UK presidency of the Council, and more particularly the negotiations on the future financing of the European Union. The purpose of the study is to discuss whether the holding of the presidency implies political influence for the member state. To analyse the power of the country holding the chair the thesis focuses on the presidency functions of brokering and leadership. The theory suggests that the influence of the presidency is derived from informational and procedural power resources, as well as some leadership resources, such as coercion and reward. A case study was used to analyse whether these power resources were used by the British presidency.

The theory of deliberative democracy believes in collective decision-making to achieve an expanded legitimacy and rationality in the political process. It is argued that those good public dialogues best take places in public spheres between citizens, where the common interest is carefully thought about. This thesis was done with the assumption that theatre can strengthen the idea of the public sphere and create a meeting place in the civil society, where a good public dialogue can appear. To create a good public dialogue you need citizens that are corresponding and participatory. Citizens who participate in the political process develop an increased knowledge about the society and the more knowledge about the society the larger reason to participate.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze and examine India's economic reforms which the country introduced on the government's own initiative in the early 1990s after decades of practicing isolationism. The analysis entails a thorough systematic examination of possible factors that determined the decision to implement the reforms. These factors are derived from two models developed by scholars within the field of foreign policy.The research is performed through an examination where the possible factors for the reforms have been examined on a three-level basis; system-, state- and individual level. It is a qualitative case study that seeks to explain not only why the Indian government implemented the reforms but also to evaluate the validity of the models to the extent that they stand in accordance with the case of India.The conclusion presented in this thesis is that one model works better for explaining the case of India. The model lie emphasis on structural changes, a crisis and political entrepreneurs committed to a certain type of reforms as a prerequisite for policy change to take place.

In November 2006 and July 2007, changes were made to the Social Services Law and the Criminal Injuries Law, defining children who have witnessed domestic violence as crime victims. The objective of our study is to examine if these changes have affected how social workers responsible for child protection inquiries interact with children who have witnessed domestic violence, and to what extent these children?s need of support are taken into account. Qualitative interviews have been carried out with five social workers, with the aim to evaluate how they meet and become aware of these children. Our problem-formulation is based upon the question how social services implement the recent changes to the law.

The purpose of this thesis is to shed light on a present trend of professionalization in Swedish local environmental politics, which have recently seen a decline in active participation of the citizens in favor of an increased governmental regulation. With the aim to closer investigate this relatively new phenomenon, the paper is a qualitative single case-study of environmental policies in the Swedish municipality of Karlskrona. In this case, the municipality is obviously balancing between regarding the interests of the national level and the interests of its own citizens at the same time. This motivates the use of system-theory, and relates to the classical political paradox between participation and efficiency which is also a present theme in the paper.This text-analysis based on interviews with personnel and documents from the municipality shows a visible trend of professionalization in the local politics of the municipality of Karlskrona, from a large grade of participation and a strong bottom-up approach in the days of Agenda 21 to now being more strongly top-down defined by national environmental objectives and principally operated on a professional level..

In this thesis the author has through a discourse analysis examined how the concept of culture has been used in the discourse of integration during the late twentieth century in Sweden. The author argues that the integration of immigrating people has been the fundamental method in creating Swedish citizens within the immigrant communities. In this discourse the concept ?culture? has been a constant recurring way of explaining differences among the immigrants towards ?ethnic swedes? and Swedish way of life and establishing difficulties in performing integration outside of governmental policies. When looked upon in terms of discourse the integration process is the possibilities, intents and interests and the actual creation i.e.

With the expansion onto the international market almost a decade ago, Swedish energy corporation Vattenfall began it's breaking and burning of coal on German soil. Criticism aimed at Vattenfall peaked in the mid 2000s with the revelation of large quantities of carbon dioxide emissions and the re-location of villages and graveyards in German states Brandenburg and Saxony. The purpose of this thesis is to show where the responsibility for these activities lie. By analyzing the history of, and the political debate surrounding, Vattenfall, I will show that the prevailing policies of right- as well as left-wing parties in the 20th century were all, regarding this matter, market oriented. I will also show that these market promoting policies made possible a situation where the transparancy of, and state control over, Vattenfall were close to eliminated.

The aim of this thesis is to study the cause of Egypt´s failed development of the transition to democracy and vice versa, the reason why Turkey succeeded in democratic transition. Thesis methodology is a comparative analysis between design units Egypt and Turkey. Thus, the most similar design used in the investigation.European Commission began in 1998 to review Turkey´s political and economic reforms to fulfil the Copenhagen criteria. 2005 began negotiations on a Turkish- EU membership. U.S and Egypt have enjoyed close economic, security and democratic cooperation since 1975.

I denna empiriska undersökning analyserar vi argumenten som framkom i diskussionen före och under Natos intervention i Förbundsrepubliken Jugoslavien 1999. Som en bakgrund till vår analys beskriver vi det folkrättsliga regelverket samt två teoriskolor och deras syn på staten, internationella relationer och humanitär intervention. Vi genomför därefter en argumentationsanalys enligt Naess pro et contra-modell, där vi kategoriserar argumenten och bedömer deras beviskraft. Vid bedömningen av argumenten drar vi paralleller till folkrätten och till de olika teoriskolorna..

This thesis compares different justifications of human rights with the philosophy of Axel Hägerström. Hägerström´s philosophy uses a strict logic and discards the notion of the existence of absolute values and moral right and wrong. The justifications that are examined are those of Robert Nozick, Alan Gewirth and the postmodern view. Nozick emanates from arguments of natural law, which is rejected by Hägerström as metaphysics. Gewirths logical justification emanates in part from moral arguments and hence differentiates from Hägerström, but it can be used for constructing a practical application of Hägerström's philosophy and thereby motivate a legislation relating to human rights.

This thesis should be regarded as an integrated research synthesis. The purpose has been to analyse how the literary sociologist Lars Furulands model the literary process correlates in relation to todays book market for fiction. The central problem has been: In what different ways can some of the main actors featuring in Furulands model of the literary process use, produce or provide copyright protected works of fiction which are electronically distributed? Three questions have been considered to penetrate this problem: In what different ways can to judge from some projects which have been carried through at common public libraries electronic works of fiction be provided to their presumed readers? What reasons could there be as it appears in a number of texts that four Swedish authors have chosen to disseminate their works of fiction by the aid of the Internet? Which main functions may, according to current research, be supported by electronic media in connection with editing and retail of fiction? During this study a picture of two quite disconnected processes of publication has materialized. These processes seem to proceed parallelly to each other, without any close contact, in a traditional respectively an electronic circuit.

The aim of this study was to examine how the political party Sweden Democrats is represented in two Swedish newspapers. The study included a national newspaper and a local newspaper, Aftonbladet and Blekinge Läns Tidning. We studied 35 articles from both papers, from 2005 and from 2009. We analyzed the texts using the linguist Norman Faircloughs (1995) method for discourse analysis. Based on his theories, we created our own model to examine the texts. Our model primarily focused on representation. The study was conducted at a time when Sweden Democrats was given much support in opinion polls and knocked on the door to the Swedish Parliament. The study showed that Sweden Democrats in both newspapers, primarily by descriptions, the choice of interviewees, etc., often are represented as racists.

This thesis analyses how a radiology department at the largest hospital in Sweden, Karolinska University Hospital, most profitably could expand its capacity for investigating cancer patients using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The queues today for patients waiting to be scanned are long, which delays the start of cancer treatments. Meanwhile the hospital has a budget deficit of half a billion SEK, which make any expansion hard. In this thesis we evaluate the alternatives of investing in new machinery; utilize the current machinery better by using them more days annually or through a shift work system. Finally we evaluate a combination of these.

This Masters Degree thesis aims at giving an answer to what underlying ideologies are at work in digitizing our cultural heritage. Other questions to be answered are who are benefiting from a digitized cultural heritage and who are not, and what different opinions about digitizing our cultural heritage can be identified. Two studies are made in this thesis, one of Swedish political documents that concern digitizing our cultural heritage, libraries, museums and archives, and the other one is a study of documentation of three Swedish digitizing projects. In the first study three different, but closely associated ideologies are identified, namely a preserving, b giving access and c a mixture of both, and these are shown in a model. In the second study this model is then used to identify the ideologies of one project from each sector of the so called ABM-sector Archives, Libraries and Museums.

The aim of this report was to investigate which factors determine municipal taxes in Sweden.The aim was also to find out whether and how the forms of political rule are significant covariates. A multiple regression analysis was performed using data from 289 municipalities. The analysis resulted in five dierent models, of which a model based on municipal grouping was found to be most satisfactory. In all of the models, there are effects from the form of political rule. The results indicate that socialist municipalities have higher tax rates than non-socialist.