The purpose of this thesis is to examine the political ambitions regarding culture inVärmland, and the situation for artists living on the countryside in Värmland. This meansthat the conditions surronding the artists situation will be looked upon. I have chosen thepolitical document Kulturplanen, created by Region Värmland, as my guideline to whatkind of political view there is on art and cultures role in the region. Furthermore, I havechosen Pierre Bourdieu`s theory about art as a field controlled by and under the influenceof different rules within the filed itself and what or whom has the power to act and be apart of the filed. I also use interviews as my method for this study.

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.

Title: Merkel with NSA on the telephoneThe aim of this essay is to study how Angela Merkel is being portrayed in context of NSAs surveillance in the Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. The time period for the study is from the 24th of October to the 7th of November in the autumn of 2013. To concretize the aim three questions was formulated, how Angela Merkel was being portrayed in the material, how NSAs surveillance of Angela Merkel was being portrayed in the material and how different statements for various individuals in the material could affect the truth about the surveillance. The method chosen to study these questions was a discourse analysis, which also would contain parts of a linguistic analysis. The theories to support the method were Laclau & Mouffes discourse theory and Michel Foucault?s genealogical discourse analysis.

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.

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.

AbstractTitle: The Sweden Democrat is coming! ? A quantitative study of the framing of the Sweden Democrats in the local press during the month of the parliamentary election in 2010 (Sverigedemokraten kommer! ? En kvantitativ studie av hur Sverigedemokraterna gestaltades i lokalpressen under månaden för riksdagsvalet 2010)Number of pages: 41 (42 including enclosures)Author: Tobias EnefalkTutor: Amelie HössjerCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Autumn 2010University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala UniversityPurpose/Aim: This essay seeks to study how the Swedish political party the Sweden Democrats was framed in Swedish local press during the month of the parliamentary election in 2010. The study is based upon eight local newspapers located in the municipalities where the voting result for the Sweden Democrats increased the most and the least.Material/Method: The material consists of 263 articles from eight different local newspapers gathered from the month of September 2010 (the month of the election). Using a quantitative content analysis and a cluster analysis inspired by Matthes & Kohring, a comparison of the framing is made between the different newspapers. The results of this comparison are then analyzed and discussed by applying theories of political communication, media logic and framing.Main results: The results show that some similarities and some differences occur regarding the framing of the Sweden Democrats between the different newspapers.

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.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was a vast experience, not solely for the former members and inhabitants of the Soviet Union, but also for the rest of the world. This thesis examines Estonia and Uzbekistan's different experience with transition. By examining three different aspects of transition I seek to explain Estonia and Uzbekistan's different outcome of transition. Estonia has since their independence been fully aware of the process that started with their independence. They have reformed both the political and economic system, the industry is privatized, institutions democratic and Estonia is today a member of the European Union.

During the later parts of the 20th century there occurred several changes to the Swedish public sector. These changes aimed to effectivize and decentralize the governance model in the public sector. One of these changes was the municipalization of the school system, put forward and proposed by the social democratic government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This study aims to examine and compare that times different parliamentary parties' opinions on the municipalization of the school system. The source material consists of government bills, and in direct relation to the municipalization of the school system.

This essay deals with the paradox of why the immigrants in Sweden, despite their considerable size of 12 % of the population and common interest and living opportunities, haven?t mobilized politically in any significant way. The aim with this essay is to reach a theoretical understanding of why this paradox exist. By the use of a critical case and a theoretical model, based on theories of collective action, the conclusion of this essay is that, despite the fact that the immigrants have a common interest and an organizational structure, the immigrants in Sweden has not mobilized politically in any significant way. The main reason for this is that they have a weak common identity and they don?t have the structural opportunities to act..

In recent years the liberal representative democracy has been subject of a substantial critique because of its inability to accommodate difference and createa genuinely democratic political process. One such critique comes from the theory of deliberative democracy. Supporters of deliberative democracy try to promote a model of democracy that take its vantage point in free and equal deliberationbetween all relevant actors in a political community. This model has with some success opposed the aggregative model of democracy, and in important ways turned the attention to the potential of deliberative processes.However, the deliberative model is still somewhat underdeveloped when it comes to issues of diversity and difference. This essay deals with such deficiencies by analysing deliberative democracy in the light of the critiquelaunched by difference- and radical democrats.