Since the nineteen-fifties, the American political scientist Robert Dahl (born in 1915) has been one of the most prominent democracy theorists in the world. In the book Politics, Economics, and Welfare, he and his colleague Charles E. Lindblom in 1953 introduced the notion of polyarchy as a denomination for the incomplete democracies of the Western world. Linguistically speaking, this notion was formed in connection with the ones already existing in the philosopher Aristotle's (384-322 B.C.) comparative teachings on government. Later, it has become apparent that the notion of polyarchy has already been in use by other authors, such as Johannes Althusius (1614) and Sir Ernest Barker (1947).Robert Dahl has been active at Yale University (in New Haven, Connecticut, USA), and is regarded as one of the foremost representatives of the political-science discipline known as pluralism.

AbstractDet övergripande syftet med uppsatsen är att förstå varför det förekommit problem med färdtjänsten i Lund sedan seklets början. Vi undersöker dels vad det innebär att styra färdtjänsten med kontrakt och dels beställarkompetensen hos tekniska förvaltningen i Lund. Våra resultat visar på att styrformen i sig inte behöver orsaka problem, men att det troligen spelar in i detta fall eftersom förvaltningen inte haft tillräcklig beställarkompetens för att minska vissa transaktionskostnader av kontraktsstyrningen. Det finns även vissa indikationer på att utvecklingen av förtroende mellan aktörerna missgynnats av turbulensen under de första åren på seklet. Förvaltningen rekommenderas utveckla en mer omfattande beställandekompetens genom systematiska utvärderingar..

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

This thesis examines the Swedish labour market with a focus on the immigrant part off the population. There are big differences between the immigrant and particular non-European immigrant part off the population and native Swedes. In the first part off this thesis I will show that immigrants in Sweden have a higher rate of unemployment, lower rate off employment, lower wage incomes, higher risk off unemployment and are overrepresented in low skilled, low status jobs. Even when controlling for different factors such as education level, knowledge in the Swedish language, age etc. a big gap remains.

Over the last few years, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the aid sector have grown and become important economic, social and political actors in Sweden. However this sector has also been hard criticized in terms of aid effectiveness. Church of Sweden (CoS), a well established organization in this sector, has faced new challenges in form of demands from their environment regarding reporting aid work. These demands have pushed the International Department of Church of Sweden into a process for adapting the structure in order to meet the new effectiveness requirements. Using both, Contingency Theory and Resource Dependence Theory as theoretical framework and a single case study as research strategy, this master thesis goes in deep into the description of the change of the structure of the International Department. This work shows how the different parts of the organization functions and what impact will these changes in the structure mean for the future of the organization. The analysis of the empirical evidence related to the theoretical framework shows that the organization responds to external demands through a more centralized structure than before.

This thesis is seeking to explain why policy change come about. This is done by applying a part of Karin Lindgrens dissertation Vad styr ledaren?. The research evolves around the term pressure and the hypothesis are that policy change come about when there is middle range pressure on the decision-maker. Low and high pressure results in no or small policy change.The thesis is done as a case study where the economic crisis in Thailand 1996-1999 makes my case.

This thesis is an analysis of articles published in the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds concerning the escalated conflicts within the Fatah movement during the summer in 2004.The study is done on the basis of the assumption that The Palestinian Authority (PA) expects the domestic media institutions to support the official objectives and, in this case most important, the national unity. My investigation reveals that the articles are indeed highly adjusted and purposed to unify and to hinder further growing instability, both in the politicalsphere and in the streets. The message urging for unification under the PA is constantly, directly and indirectly, repeated throughout the articles by the choice of themes and references as well as by the choice of individuals and organisations delivering statements..

The research of the essay will be about Solidarity, the Polish trade union that began to rise in the beginning of 1980. In more specific tendencies to the empirical study, it is interesting getting to know about when the free trade union was created with a view to liberate the Polish people from Communism.The essay will be studied as an empirical case study, with a qualitative text analysis. The content will also include how power is allocated to the political, economic and social aspects of the national, and international relations. Therefore it will be relevant to use a method of ideology analysis to the qualitative text.The result of the theoretical analysis was that it is difficult to apply the social movements into a political change, even if it leads to success. According to this, participants in social movements are able to use the most potential and most necessities of resources, just as activists tend to do in reality..

Our thesis is a single-case study in which we try to answer the question: Why didn?t the lobbygroup Eurogroup for Animals get enough support for their demands in the latest regulation regarding transport of animals? As an example of their cooperation with their memberorganisations, we have chosen the Swedish organisation Djurens Rätt. Through interviews with key-persons involved in the process and with the use of Jeremy Richardson's theory regarding lobbying in the EU, we found that there were many different factors that effected Eurogroup for Animals chances to get an animal friendly legislation. For example by setting too ambitious demands Eurogroup for Animals wasn?t considered to be a serious actor during the legislation process.

Rapid development in the realms of electronic publishing has had a profound impact on information services in general and the academic library in particular. Since mid 1990´s an increasingly number of scholarly journals and other information resources have been made available electronically. Electronic books are the newest electronic service in the hybrid library and can be seen as the third wave in the digital library. Although electronic books have for a long time existed as electronic texts such as digitalized classics or other texts in the public domain, it is not until recently that e-books have been distributed and packaged in a commercial form. As more e-book models are being developed, libraries are being forced to take e-books into consideration when planning their information services.The aim of this master thesis is to describe the first stage of implementation of the new electronic media, the electronic book or e-book, in Swedish academic libraries.

Sedan 2002 har kommuner runt om i landet infört medborgarförslag med syfte att öka delaktigheten och dialogen mellan medborgarna och kommunen. Detta är ett projekt som prövar att införa deltagardemokratiska inslag inom ramen för den representativa demokratin.Uppsatsen bygger på en jämförelse vi gjort mellan Lund och Kristianstad kommun med avseende på hur väl dessa lyckats med införandet av medborgarförslag och vad som detta resulterat i. Materialet som vi använt oss av är framförallt de medborgarförslag som inkommit till de båda kommunerna men även intervjuer och relaterad litteratur. Vår slutsats är att det i båda kommunerna finns ett grundläggande problem när det gäller sammansättningen av de som deltar men även att kommunerna lyckats olika väl när det gäller uppslutningen och informationen kring medborgarförslag..

The fact that we apprehend certain phenomena as more convenient than others generate questions about what constitute and decide what we think of as normal and appropriate. The aim of this thesis is to explore the immense conception of power and authority through a narrower approach that focuses on the EU.With this in mind I examine the penetration of the neo-liberal ideology in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe to see if there are any implications for hegemony. This is achieved through a discourse analysis which is strengthened with empirical cases of EU policies.The result of the discourse analysis of selected parts of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe reveals that there are in fact tendencies which indicate that our society and reality is dominated by a neo-liberal hegemonic discourse. Subsequently the contemporary discourse broadly infiltrates the entire European Union, and therefore also its member states..

Genom en litteraturbaserad teorikonsumerande metod undersöks konsekvenserna av att konsociationalismen tillämpats för att nå konfliktlösning i Nordirland som om mycket realiserats genom förvaltningsstrukturen. Både konsociationalismen och förvaltningen visar sig besitta inneboende problem. Då konsociationalismen inte uppfylls till fullo kan detta komma att påverka det fortsatta samarbetet och därmed fredssituationen negativt. Förvaltningen å andra sidan kan i dagsläget inte uppnå grundläggande demokratiska principer såsom folklig medverkan. Tillräcklig uppmärksamhet har inte riktads mot vikten av en väl fungerande förvaltning, trots att denna besitter förmågan att påverka både attityder och den grundläggande motsättningen i ett konflikthärjat samhälle.

One of the most well-known trials in history is the one in Nürnberg, Germany, soon after the end of World War II. It is understandable that this caused a lot of discussions and that it was a world known trial which set the standards for a lot of similar occasions later on. The aim of this research is to focus on the opinions about this trial from a perspective of well-known Swedish newspapers. The method is to analyse three big papers with different political views and to see what separated them and what maybe united them. By studying the master-pages of the newspapers a picture is given of how the contemporary time had an understanding for the trial reports, which we in our time have established as facts.

The topic of this thesis interest is the relation between branding as a place making/marketing technology and the process of regionalization. The main proposition advocated is that the officially communicated image of the Øresund Region, as a cohesive place and community, is a space that has been configured with branding and can be described as a territorial simulation. The concept of territorial simulation consists of two conjoined terms: simulation which aim at explaining the idiosyncratic brand image, as a social formation, which does not represent the place it imitates but commoditise it; and territorial which seeks to visualize the process of the unfolding of this image as a territory. The main argument is made in the third chapter, which traces the process of actualization of the brand image as a territory: ?Øresund?.