The purpose of this paper is to examine witch factors lays behind political decisions when reforming upper secondary school. Three major factors are used: political, economical and structural. These factors become visible by comparing the school reforms 1965 and the coming one in 2009. An analytical scheme is used to find the factors in the primary information. The study is based both political inquiries and on debate articles from newspapers and political papers.The results show that two factors are more visible than the third, and that is the ideological and structural.

During the last few years the countries in the African continent have experienced an enormous increase in female politicians on a national level. Rwanda is even the country with the highest number of female politicians in its parliament in the world. Despite this development in Africa, the quantitative research on women's political representation in the world has not yet paid attention to the situation there. Some of the surveys that have been done have even excluded countries that do not fit the homogeneous pattern ? which is precisely the problem with African countries ? for it to be possible to explain the situation with existing theories.The intention of this paper is therefore to, with all of the 53 African countries included in the study, examine whether the already existing explanatory factors regarding women's political representation also can be applied to an African context to explain the situation there.

The research objective of this thesis was to conduct a holistic evaluation of an operational information system. By holistic evaluation we mean that an equal focus was placed on both the system system perspective and its users user perspective, in the actual environment where the system and its users function contextuality. In addition, the methodological objective of the study was to test a new research approach in a real life setting. The participants of the study were twenty newspaper journalists employed at Göteborgs-Posten GP. The information system NewsLink is a manually indexed full-text database containing all articles published in GP since 1994.

People are given better opportunities to participate in polity today. Democratic equality entails that all individuals are equal and therefore they should be included in the process of making the decisions. How can participation be defined and does it mean that having the possibility to participate means that people can influence the process of making the decisions in polity process?This paper focuses on participation and influence in polity and examine the relationship between having the possibility to participate and having the possibility to actually influence polity process on more local level. Therefore I have been examining the citizens? participation and influence in Helsingborg which is my case study.

The first of the dual purposes of this work has been to describe the research that has been done regarding the root causes of terrorism and second, using a general causal theory and examining the political dimensions of it, to discuss whether or not general causal theories (grand-theories) are helpful for researchers and policy-makers when reacting to social developments in the form of terrorism. The essay is a qualitative literature analysis and I have based my studies on mostly new books treating root causes of terrorism. I have concentrated on discussing international terrorism and how political dimensions may impact the occurence of this form of political violence. The conclusions I have made is that there is no widespread consensus among researchers and scholars as to what really causes terrorism. Neither can the general model examined in chapter 5 be used to predict when and where terrorism will occur next.

This examination project is an investigation about the opinion and comprehension for political engagement of four young municipal politicians. The purpose with this project is to describe and understand the pronounced comprehension for political engagement. There is also an intention to investigate the educational in discussing political engagement with students in social studies at upper secondary school. The method that has been used is ?map of conceptions? because of its appropriate way to elucidate the comprehension and understanding of a certain subject. Those four young municipal politicians see political engagement as the will to improve the community. There is also an importance to have a large engagement in more areas than just one.

This thesis discusses the 2007 elections in Kenya, and its aftermath. The aim is to examine whether or not ethnicity played a major role in the outbreak of violence that followed the referendum. As well as different theories and discussions on ethnicity, I will also try to explain the course of events by using theories of increased civil violence during a democratic transition, and the fact that weak political institutions can cause violence. My conclusion is that ethnicity has played a part in the violence, but is too simple to blame the events following the election on just that. A number of different factors all contributed to the outbreak, but all to a different extent.

This thesis deals with non-wanted political parties e.g. right wing populism. How should a democracy handle these opinions? So far these parties have been neglected and not even considered as real parties. By excluding them from the debate and the political arena, media and more established parties have seen them merely as a threat than as democratic parties.

In December 2004 an earthquake coursed waves that hit Thailand. Over 5000 people died, and Sweden was the tourist country that has been effected the worst. The catastrophe precipitated Sweden in crises and the demand became high for Swedish government to act. Swedes followed the development via media, why media became the crucial element for how the public perceived politicians? acting.

This study aims to investigate the origin and the development of a certain type of decision phenomena, namely political decision chains. A political decision chain is defined as a seemingly rational decision being made, that is reverted through a new decision and this for other reasons than the original decision being regarded as having fulfilled its intended purpose. The essay attempts to explain the occurrence of these decision chains through a case study in order to thoroughly examine the complexities that surround political decisions overall. The essay concludes that uncontrollable factors and chance to a large extent affect the origin of these chains, allowing actors to change the political agenda according to their preferences. The relative weighting of these factors that is made by the actors, which exist within the decision chain, makes them underestimate the relative power of other actors that may have different preferences.

Political disenchantment and detachment is proven to be growing in well established democracies. This development brings along concerning behavior regarding general political participation. Fewer citizens participate in elections, parties are losing members, and the trust in politicians is steadily decreasing. IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) has been registering voter turnout worldwide for the last 60 years and their publications show a decline in voter participation since the 1980s.During the same period of time another development has caught attention, namely the fast progress of the medium Internet. The new generation of Internet functions is called Web 2.0 and allows users not only to create content, but also to interact with each other.This dissertation aims to explore the possibilities emerging when integrating Web 2.0 in political processes.

Researchers in the field of political corruption generally expect voters in democratic states to lose trust in corrupted politicians. However, there are cases where corrupted politicians maintain their popularity, a phenomenon studied in this thesis. Focus lies on three cases of political corruption: the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who has been the subject of several judicial investigations and court cases; the impeached former president of Lithuania, Rolandas Paksas; and the German Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) involvement in a party funding scandal. The cases are chosen based on the method of agreement. Berlusconi, Paksas and CDU have all, in spite of their corrupt behaviour, kept or regained popular support among a large group of their country's citizens.

Groups that are often referred to as being dismissed in society in general is by some aspects also considered being so in political arenas. A recent compilation of existing research over structurally based objections of gaining power and positions within Swedish parliamentary politics highlight a lack of research considering whether sexual orientation could be such a discriminatory basis. Using a queer theoretical approach, and drawing on concepts such as heteronormativity and homophobia, the principal aim of this essay is to illuminate aspects of local parliamentary political areas where discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation become relevant. In order to do so six in-depth interviews with homosexual politicians have been conducted. Finding a queer potential in certain ideological parliamentary political environments that enable homosexual politicians to be open about their sexual orientation, it still relies upon the individual to be confident enough not to interpret the political context as homophobic and heteronormative..

Why participate? Many studies focus on explaning non-participation in politics. The political parties are loosing members and the particiaption of young people are given extra attention. This thesis is about young people who do participate in party politics. The question is how they experience their participation and how they feel that they can have a politcal influence by being a member of the youth section of a political party.

Abstract: The purpose with this study is to analyse the political debate about freedom of speech in Sweden and Denmark, after the caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed that the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten published in September 2005. For this debate four political parties have been chosen. These are: Socialdemokratiska Partiet and Moderata Samlingspartiet in Sweden and Socialdemokraterne and Venstre in Denmark.An idea analysis has been chosen as method, and dimensions as an analysing tool. The overall result of the analysis is that right- and left political parties in Sweden and Denmark are more alike, than different in their political debate about free speech. They all wish for total freedom of speech, and see that as the foundation of the democratic society.