The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ongoing changes in German family policy. It explores the issue of whether the German welfare state, in this policy field, can still be regarded as a conservative welfare model or rather approaches a more liberal or social democratic model. A qualitative method is used to analyze the material, especially from the German government, including press releases, other public documents and also articles from the political weekly magazines Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. The changes analyzed are the new parental benefit, the expansion of child care, the concept of whole-day schools and the system of joint taxation. The point of departure is Gösta Esping-Andersen?s categorization of three types of welfare states: the social democratic, the conservative and the liberal.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the use of social media by the Swedish Police for democratic purposes. The idea of citizen empowerment is closely related to the development of new communication technologies such as social media. Yet many studies indicate that governmental institutions rarely make use of the assumed potentials of social media.In this study, the democratic potential of social media is derived from Habermas normative concept of deliberative participation. Operational definitions emphasize discursive equality, interactive reciprocity and external impact. The analytical framework is combined with qualitative text analysis to highlight the conditions of interaction between representatives of the Police and citizens.In conclusion: the democratic potential of social media, from a Habermasian point of view, is to a significant extent neglected at the expense of its strategic advantages.

AbstractSince democracy was developed in the ancient Greece it has come to be used within a small city state, within the national state and as today used within a bigger perspective. After the end of the second world war political leaders wanted to make sure that there would never be a war between European countries again. Now, about 60 years later this type of cooperation now involves 27 of the European countries and goes under the name of the Euroapean Union. This means that democracy is no longer used just within the nation state, but within a big organisation that is responsible for almost 500 million Europeans lives. This also means that the European Union need to make some institutional reforms to be able to handle all the future challenges.

The purpose with this study is to investigate how the two biggest political parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderate/Conservative Party, looks at a membership in the defense alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The question have the illegal annexation of Crimea affected how the parties look at a membership in Nato will be answered and analyzed. How they discuss, how they believe that a membership can affect the Swedish foreign policy will be examined in this paper. Nato is a topic that during the last century?s have divided the Swedish population into two groups: one that advocates a membership and one that fight?s against a Swedish membership in the alliance. The debate about Nato has, since the illegal annexation of the Crimea, changed and are now more relevant than ever to discuss.

The Swedish Moderate party, often also called the Conservative party, was founded with conservatism as the dominant ideology. During the years, however, liberalism has gradually found its way into the party. The aim of this study is to analyze the Moderate party?s political platforms from 1984 to 2013 from an ideological perspective. Is conservatism still a foundational ideology in the Moderate party, or has the liberal ideology taken its place? The study is based on an ideal type analysis that illustrates the Moderate party?s argumentation in six political issues in the years 1984, 1993 and 2013.

The subject of this study has been organizational change within two Scandinavian green parties ? the Swedish Green Party and the Norwegian Green Party. Looking at the organizational changes within these two parties using Robert Michel?s famous concept the ?iron law of oligarchy?, I have studied whether these two parties have become more oligarchic after having been elected to the national parliaments of Sweden and Norway respectively. What I have found is that although these two parties still retain much of the original organizational structure that they have had, in particular the Swedish Green Party, change has occurred and seems to be occurring, at least in the Norwegian Green Party, which would indicate that the two parties have become more oligarchic.

This thesis aims to investigate whether the parties Danish People?s Party, the Progress Party, the Finns Party and the Sweden Democrats can be categorized within the same party family, based upon the parties positions regarding the EU and European integration. The thesis contributes to increased knowledge and deeper understanding about these parties stances toward the EU and European integration, with a particular focus on how euroscepticism is expressed within each party. The thesis addresses the following research questions: which category of euroenthusiast, europragmatist, eurosceptic and euroreject best describes each of the four parties? Do the parties fall within the same category, or are they dispersed across different categories? The categories are based on different conceptualizations of euroscepticism (Kopeck? & Mudde, 2002), which composes the theoretical framework along with an analytical scheme based on the different conceptualizations.

According to the curriculum the Swedish school system should aim to let the democratic values permeate the school as a whole, and the school should assume each student's individual abilities in teaching. (Lpo -94) Democratic education is what the pragmatist John Dewey strongly encourages in his book Democracy and Education, which is why he stands for the theoretical framework of the concept of democracy in the school context. This study aims to examine whether and if so, the social roles in a classroom can affect students' opportunities for learning. The main research questions asked were:How can the social roles affect students' opportunities for learning in a classroom? How do students perceive that the social roles in the classroom affect their opportunities for learning? This has been investigated by two complementary perspectives.  Partly thru a student perspective to raise the students 'own experiences, and partly from an outside perspective to show how I, as an observer can see that social roles affect students' opportunities for learning.

The Swedish Moderate party has openly referred to themselves as a liberal-conservative party. This definition, however, leads to a possible ambiguity where the extent to which the party is conservative, and liberal is up for debate. Furthermore, this might allow for extensive changes within the party, while still using the same ideological mantra. This study employs a longitudinal ideological analysis of five official party documents published between 1984 and 2022 to analyse how the party has drifted between the two ideologies over the years. The analysis is done using three political areas: immigration, economy, and safety.

In recent years, the right-wing extremist site Avpixlat (?Unveiled?) and the anti-racist blog Inte rasist, men... (?Not a racist, but??, IRM) have established themselves as political actors and platforms for political discussion in Sweden. However, we know very little about them and their impact on democracy.

This paper addresses how political parties make decisions. Parties often have to choose between conflicting objectives such as influence on policy, control of the government, and support among the voters. This paper examines the behavior of the two Swedish parties on one of their particular policy positions: Swedish withdrawal from the EU. The aim is to describe why the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) and the Green Party (Miljöpartiet) retain thisspecific policy position when it on one hand seems damaging to their chances of getting into government, and on the other seems to be an unrealistic policy to realize. I undertake a twocase study of the two Swedish parties, which I assume to represent a population of Nordic parties critical to the EU.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Tage Erlander, made a speech on the 22 of August 1961 in which he dismissed speculation that Sweden was seeking to abandon its neutral stance and non-alignment in foreign policy with a view to requesting membership of the European Economic Community. The reason was that the EEC was supposed to have a political part where a connection with NATO should have existed. This speech led to a domestic discussion which has been called the most intense debate of foreign affairs in recent history. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the reactions of the other parliamentary parties to Erlander?s speech.

This study is about youths, democracy and school. It seeks to describe and problemize the school's role in the democratic society. Firstly, using Social Representations Theory, 44 upper secondary shool pupils? representations, or conceptions, of democracy are described and discussed. These representations are then analyzed in relation to the school's role in the democratic society, as it is described by different researchers.The results show that many of the youths have a rather simplistic and abstract view of democracy, describing it only in terms of general principles and the main features of the representative democracy, such as voting in national elections.

The aim of this study is to illuminate and discuss a case of political steering, specifically Managment-By-Objectives (MBO) in Swedish municipalities, from a democratic perspective. The essay examines a discrepancy between MBO in the Swedish municipalities and democratic theory.To fulfil the aim of the study one leading politician and one leading civil servant from five municipalities have been interviewed on this matter. This material is discussed in the light of a democratic theory constructed specifically for this essay. The democratic theory consists of three main democratic values in the democratic process: debate, transparence and the ability to demand political accountability.The main conclusion is that there is a contradiction in the use of MBO and the democratic values of debate, transparence and the ability to demand political accountability. MBO has resulted in a lack of debate and transparency and furthermore, it has made it increasingly more difficult to demand political accountability..

The aim of the following paper has been to test the democratic peace theory through applying it on the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008.  This to either falsify the theory or come to the conclusion that the states? democracy was not satisfactory in regards to the definition of liberal democracy. The questions asked are: Was Russia and Georgia democratic states? Is democracy a protection from war? And which aspects of the liberal democratic theory, if any, were not satisfactory in either of the countries? The results show that the democratic peace theory is valid in this case and that neither one of the states were democratic.