Bolivia is a multiethnic country where the indigenous people constitute the majority of the population. Despite two decades of attempts to take the democracy further is its foundation more volatile than ever. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine if exclusion is taken place in Bolivia from year 1982 until today and if so in which way political exclusion constitute problems of democracy in Bolivia. The answer depends on the understanding of democracy used in the analysis. In this thesis I use theories of process-, participation- and deliberative democracy.

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.

The aim of this essay was to study the European Union?s (EU) role as a democracy promoter and its impact on Croatia?s democratization process. Croatia is a candidate country for membership in the EU which creates a possibility for impact and democracy promotion. The aim is met by studying the following questions:  In what way has the EU promoted democracy in Croatia? How did Croatia respond? To what extent has the EU contributed to Croatia?s democratization process?  Croatia is treated as a case study of the EU?s democracy promotion and the method used was qualitative text-analysis.

The study aims to investigate student participation as a tool for democratic development in secondary school from a student perspective. Furthermore, students' perceptions of the school's work with student participation in formal and informal contexts are also investigated, with basis in the teaching structure. The results are based on interviews conducted with students who all attend the same class in their last year of high school. Subsequently, an analysis is made based mainly on three different theories: democracy, curricula and sociocultural theory. The result shows that students feel that they are able to practice student participation but the amount of influence they get differs between individuals depending on devotion and commitment.

This thesis aims at analysing conflicts between different ideals of democracy, using the example of a newly implemented citizen´s initiative reform. This reform gives citizens the right to make policy proposals to Swedish municipal councils. The proposals are to be handled in the same way as proposals from the municipal council members. An ideology analysis of various government documents as well as of an official state study (SOU) is carried out to identify and discuss the ideals of democracy that underpin the reform. The analysis is based on participatory democracy and electoral democracy theory and Arnstein's Eight Rungs on the Ladder of Citizen Participation is used to discuss different types of participation by the citizens.

The organisation of the municipalities is based on the principle of representation. It has previously been impossible to give the citizens more influence through direct democracy, but the information technology gives new possibilities and the choice of democracy model might no longer be obvious. Representation can be interpreted in many ways and there is a need for a more distinct definition of the rule that the municipalities shall be governed according to the principle of representation. It should also be further investigated how the new technology can be used to increase the use of direct democracy. The municipalities ought to work to supplement the representation with direct democracy in the form of active discourse with the citizens.

In this study we wanted to have a closer look at how a specific working team of pedagogues in the senior part of elementary school works with student influence through a pedagogical concept created by themselves. We have used qualitative interviews as a method to achieve relevant information from the pedagogues, and from students teached by the same.The purpose of the study was to investigate how the working team, through the concept, pursue real student influence within different school subjects and how the individual student is favored in his/her learning process. Another intention was to find out to what extent the students experience this influence. We also wanted to elucidate the advantages as well as the disadvantages of this concept, and to shed some light on how the informants view the future development of the concept.The result shows that consensus prevails to a large extent among teachers and students regarding the signification of real student influence in the everyday learning situation. It also appears that the students? abilities to exercise influence vary between different school subjects.

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.

From a democratic point of view the existing organisation with municipality sections in the city of Malmö, Sweden will be examined. The matter of how an alternative organisation should be structured will also be discussed. Two incompatible models of democracy theories will be arranged: libertarian democracy and participation democracy. The intentions with the reform were primary to increase the civic participation. By applying those values that are used to characterize participation democracy it will be shown whether the local participation has actually increased.

The purpose of this study is to highlight how Swedish primary school teachers teach of and about democracy and based on this then compare with how the primary school teachers in South Africa teaches of and about democracy. This comparison will then highlight what can be developed in the teaching of and about democracy in Swedish schools. The method used in this study is mind maps because it gives a greater depth in the way teachers look at teaching democracy. The result of this comparison is that South Africa's history pervades the entire democracy education in school but both Sweden and South Africa use methods as dialogue and discussion in teaching of and about democracy. Furthermore, the community, curriculum, teacher and cooperation with other teachers also have an influence on how democracy's teaching looks like in schools.

In the thesis we discuss South African teachers? conceptions of democracy in general and school democracy in particular. The essay is based on interviews with twelve teachers, working in South African high schools. We have asked questions concerning different views of democracy, such as what the term means to the teachers and how they define a democratic school. We take our stand in different theoretical approaches such as school being the ultimate link between a state and its people to make the citizens think and act democratically.

In today?s school in Sweden the assignment of community encompasses mediated values and education of democracy as well of single subject matters. What does it mean then, that teachers have a certain kind of idea of democracy, and what implications may biology have for the assignment of community? In upper secondary school there are quite many courses in biology with a national curriculum, and findings show that students of teaching perceive or think of biology as helping to promote the dual-purpose of teaching. In this study, the author of the paper has interviewed four future teachers of upper secondary school with biology as one of their main subjects.

 In this essay the aim was to investigate how the EU is trying to function as a democracy promoter in three particular countries, the so called candidate-countries Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey. The aim was also to analyze if there exist any differences in how the EU functions in these countries as a democracy promoter with a focus on how acts of democracy promotion is taken place. In order to fulfil the purpose of the essay two questions were addressed, how does the EU perform in promoting democracy in the three candidate-countries Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey? And also, is it possible to identify any differences in how the EU functions as a democracy promoter in those three countries?The method used to fulfil purpose and answering research-questions was qualitative text-analysis.  The results of the study were that the EU does perform in a number of ways to promote democracy in the three countries. The main differences are that the EU is using primarily political tools in Croatia and Macedonia which are channelized top-down and economic tools in Turkey channelized mainly top-down to promote democracy.

This survey is a qualitative study about how teachers see on the concept student leverage and what they say about how they in practice work with it. We have chosen to examine the subject from a teacher?s perspective, because almost all investigations and literature, that we have found, discuss student influence from a student?s perspective. That?s why we are interested to examine what teachers think of the subject.

This thesis intends to analyse conditions for a successful implementation of consociational democracy, as a democratic model in Afghanistan. The lack of critical reviews regarding the democratisation-process in Afghanistan initiated the purpose of this study.Lijpharts democracy model was used as the basis in the comparative study. Along with empirical evidence regarding how the complex process of democracy in Afghanistan is progressing, the study investigated whether the identified conditions occurred or not.The choice of which democracy model to use can be crucial for the democratic possibilities to even survive and become established in conflict-affected communities. The principle of consociational democracy is that it is an empirically based normative model that aims to organise the state in a way that works against the risks of majority domination and oppression against the minority.The empirical case study revealed that a majority of the conditions were not met, which then can counteract the possibilities for consociational democracy in Afghanistan. The study has critically examined the prospects for the success of consociational democracy in Afghanistan, and it can be assessed that there is a limited probability for a successful applying of this model..