The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is described in Swedish mass media. The research question of the paper is "How was president Hugo Chávez portrayed in Swedish newspapers in the 2004 Venezuelan referendum?". The answer of this question provides information about how the mass media form the image of current political events which is an important aspect of power. The applied method and theory in the study is the critical discourse analysis.

A possible "discursive turn" is believed to have been observed within Swedish political science in later years. The purpose of this study is to examine whether or not such a turn has actually taken place, in order to further determine if a resulting theoretical homogeneity poses a risk to the ability of Swedish political science to identify and respond to its full width of possible research problems, and to determine its perspectives on both these problems and the results that are later communicated to the general society. To do so, the study poses the following primary research question:"Has a discursive turn occurred within Swedish political science?"This question is then broken down into two specified research questions."Has discourse analysis become a more common approach for doctoral dissertations in political science during the period of 2000-2013?""Have ideas corresponding with discourse theory become more common within doctoral dissertations in political science that are not pure discourse analyses during the period of 2000-2013?"These questions are then answered by examining all known 406 doctoral dissertations in political science published in Sweden during the 21st century up until (and including) the year of 2013, using two forms of content analysis, one manual and one computer-assisted. The study finds no clear evidence of a discursive turn in Swedish political science since the turn of the century.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of market-led culture, focusing on literature, within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business by comparing the attitudes and ideas expressed in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. To illuminate, and with an effort to explain, these attitudes and ideas expressed in the documents their political and social context has been studied as well. The theoretical starting point is two political ideologies, and Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. The methodological starting point is two variants of analyses that are textual ones.

Studies have found that the applicability of commercial marketing strategies within politics have increased in recent years as a result of a rising number of swing voters. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the commercial theory of incongruent information in political marketing in Sweden. Subsequently, an experiment with 742 participants was conducted, testing the effects of congruent and incongruent ad messages for two established Swedish parties. The effect of ad message choice on several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as awareness, credibility, attitude, conviction and voting intentions was analyzed. The results showed that incongruent information effectively increases attitude, conviction and voting intention for voters who decide on the election day what party to vote for.

BackgroundPolitics in some ways has always been about communication and marketing. In Sweden some people believe that communication and meaningful relations with the voters are of no value, instead it is the political content that is of importance. Media evolution has changed the conditions of political marketing; this has meant that the choices of the right communication channels in political marketing have become more important today than ever. Political competition in Sweden has become more even in recent years, this has called for political communication and marketing to be more planed and well thought out. Political parties have therefore begun to spend millions on marketing themselves.

On the 17th of January 2002 the Swedish government presented a bill to theSwedish parliament, proposing ways of strengthening the Swedish democracythrough reforms for increased elements of participatory democracy. A publicreport on the state of the Swedish democracy had been released two years earlierwith similar enthusiasm for participatory democracy. However, the participatoryideals of these two documents were strongly criticised by a group of scholars.The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the arguments articulatedbetween the years 2000 and 2002 by the actors mentioned above, and to examinetheir relation to arguments concerning political participation, articulated bythinkers from previous times. By classifying the arguments into different groupsdepending on their content I find that both parties in the Swedish argumentationfocus on the effects of participatory democracy on political equality, on theefficiency of the political decision-making and the quality of the decisions beingmade, and finally on the personal character of the citizens. Among the argumentsarticulated by thinkers from previous times, similarities with the Swedishargumentation can be seen as well as important differences.

This is a study about the relation between the Swedish school and the political system of Sweden. I wanted to see if the relation had changed since the election of 2010 as it was in that election the Sweden Democrats got over five percent of the votes and took seat in the Swedish parliament. The thing that is unique about this election is that it was really the first time a right-wing party had been elected into the Swedish parliament. Many experts argue that this is the first xenophobic party that has been elected into the Swedish parliament. This led to a problem for schools and their principals and a difficult question to answer because xenophobia is contrary to the school?s core values and the school?s democratic mission.Should the school still be open for political parties? How do schools manage to distinguish between political information and political propaganda? If parties still are welcome into the schools, which parties should be allowed? The equality ombudsman has said in a report that the schools have to comply with the principle of objectivity, which stipulates that the public sector has to be unbiased.I have chosen to make use of a qualitative method because I think the study then gets a deeper understanding of the topic.

News value is an essential part of which event media chooses to report about. Political events consider to bee news with potentional large value. Media has an enormous power and possibility to create news and construct there own reality and where the readers is given a false expression of what really happened. Today the media must show profit and that indirect affects how the media choose to describe political events. In the Kenya case is it therefore possible to draw the conclusion that the two news paper has different construction of the political event in Kenya.

Turkey has recieved recurring criticism on their disrespect of women and their rights and The European Union Commission and CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, are two examples of critics. However, during the last years Turkey has shown a number of improvments and positive developments. Two flagrant examples of the extended debate of the above mentioned scarcity is within the area of legislation and the large number of womenNGO´s.The aim of my thesis is to investigate which strategies womenorganizations in Turkey are using to affect the political agenda from a genderperspective; do they choose an international or a national strategi? The analysis is based on four womenNGO´s and their efforts of influence and effects on the political agenda and how they experience the link between themselves and the Turkish government. My findings suggest that a national strategy is chosen before an international strategy, but the choice seems to depend on specific goals of the organization and the national climate.

This study analyzes the political view of criminality and crime politics in three political parties in the Swedish parliament, Socialdemokraterna, Folkpartiet and Moderaterna. The study seeks to describe which kind of view these parties present on the criminality in our society. The material for this study is the ideologies that the parties descend from which are, socialism, liberalism and conservatism, the political programs of these three parties have also been studied as well as the parties proposals, political documents in the Swedish parliament. The current public debate shows that the crime politics is an attractive question and the parties may seem to have similar proposals on how to lower the criminality in our society. The theory that has been used to describe the results of the study is ?actors and structures? and the results are related to this theory as well as the theory has been used as an instrument to explain and sort the material and the results.The results of the study show that the parties are different in their views on criminality as a problem in our society.

Title: The battle of the budget ? Communication in a modern policy (Slaget om budgeten ?Kommunikation inom den moderna politiken)Numbers of pages: 39Author: Niclas KarlssonTutor: Peder Hård af SegerstadCourse: Media and Communication studies CPeriod: Autumn 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The purpose of the paper is to see how Minister of Finance Anders Borg andthe Social Democratic economic spokesman Thomas Östros communicate their messages tothe public.Material/Method: The material is the minutes of the budget debate in the SwedishParliament. The method is rhetorical analysis and content analysis.Main result: Trust making is very important for both of them, especially when the financecrisis reached Sweden. The most common rhetorical quality is ethos.Keywords: Strategic political communication, rhetorical analysis, political trust..

AbstractWhy don't (some) regimes with formal democratic features undergo transition to democracy? Which are the internal dynamics of these regimes that can offer comprehension to this state of affairs? The main purpose of this thesis is to advance the above questions, and, on a lower level of abstraction, examine the case of Egypt. The Egyptian regime is characterized by, for instance, a multiparty-system, steps toward economic liberalization, and some level of persistent state opposition, and has been considered on the way to liberal democracy, but can still hardly be estimated as such.Thus, the thesis takes part in a theoretical framework on democratization, and further analyzes the case of Egypt on grounds of socioeconomic development, political culture, and class configuration. By this contextual approach, the thesis adduces that a low level of modernization, an incomplete democratic political culture, and a bourgeoisie supported by the state are impending significant factors. The thesis additionally remarks on the interconnection of the adopted theories, and discusses a potential need for new theoretical propositionsA secondary aim of the thesis also gives some insights into the concurrence of regime stability and the absence of democracy in, what often could be labelled, authoritarian regimes.

The purpose of this essay is to present, from a theoretical framwork about regional democracy, possible methods to handle the regional democratic problems in Östergötland in Sweden and to investigate the opinion of the political parties regarding this issue. Both the national and the local/regional level are investigated. The contents of the essay is based on literature studies and interviews of politicians in Östergötland. Regional democratic problems that is discussed are the political responsibility and the power distribution between the political actors on the regional level. A solution of the problem could be to organize the regional society structure in accordance with one of the following organization models"Statligt regionalt ansvar","Kommuner i samverkan"or"Regionalt folkstyre".

Regionalism is a concept of extensive proportions and as such is complex to define. This phenomenon becomes much clearer by studying it from different perspectives. This paper focuses on regional political parties and description of their political ideas. The goal of this paper is to examine and compare regional political parties in two Swedish regions: Norrbotten and Skåne. By studying two biggest regional parties in these regions, namely Norrbottensparti and Skånepartiet, I will try to get an insight into the regional politics, as well as illustrate regionalism and its meaning.

What role should science play in democracy? Political scientists often assume that it is possible to demarcate between ?instrumental? and ?moral? knowledge, and argue that citizens and/or politicians should use their moral knowledge to agree upon political goals and then apply the instrumental knowledge of scientists to achieve them. This straightforward view is challenged by writers in science studies, who identify three major problems in the use of science in democracy: uncertainty, risk and hidden values. They suggest that these problems could be solved through citizen participation.In this essay I perform an analysis of the internal logic of their suggestion. Is it likely that citizen participation enhances the democratic decision making process so as to reduce the problems? The internal analysis shows that it is rational to advocate citizen participation by reasons of legitimacy.