The activity of interest groups in the political process of the European Union has given rise to a broad debate concerning the effect on European democracy these groups have. As relatively powerful political actors, the question of these groups? views on the EU and how the union should be is an important one. The status of these groups owns democratic representation also affects the democratic status of the EU. Being based on a number of theories, this study adopts an ideology analysis for the purpose of testing these theories on two cases ? the Swedish environmental organizations World Wide Fund for Nature and The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

The number of public schools in Sweden has increased strongly over the past twenty years. This essay gives a possible explanation to how the Social Democratic Party in Sweden took part in this evaluation from 1987 to 1997. I've analysed how the party's ideology in this issue was shaped and adapted to the opposite politics, when the Liberals and Conservatives Parties were in government.The empirical analyse is primarily based on official documents from the Parlament such as debates, government bills and motions. I have also studied the Social Democratic Party's congresses which took place during this period of time. I have practised two different theories in analysing the motives behind the acting.

This Bachelor Thesis looks at the cooperation between the Swedish civil society and theEuropean Union (EU), and it aims at evaluating Swedish civil society organizations' influencewithin the EU's development work on policy level. It focuses primarily on eight civil societyorganizations, and it is based on empirical material collected in Stockholm and Gothenburg,Sweden. The material has been analyzed using three theoretical frameworks. The firstdetermines whether the structure of the EU allows bottom-up influence, the second looks atthe communication between the EU and civil society organizations, and the third assesseswhether the civil society has the ability to influence the political agenda within the EU?sdevelopment work.Conclusions of the thesis include determining the complex structure of the EU as a mainobstacle to influencing the EU's development work.

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.

The objective of this undergraduate thesis is to study the Swedish Social Democatic Party?s standpoint of the law allowing asylum seekers to choose where to live (ebo) between 1994-2009. The study?s empirical material is being based on official documents from the Swedish Parliament, which is being analyzed by a method called ?process-tracing?. A research question has been formulated to supplement the objective:What arguments has the Swedish Social Democratic Party expressed pro and con the law of ?ebo?? The study?s theoretical framwork is based on two theories which explain incentives behind parties? decision-making, strategic or ideological, on three arenas. As the law was ratified the party took a positive standpoint, but later shifted to become stricly against it.

In scientific investigations on how organizations can learn from their mistakes the perspective is usually that of the social engineer; the object is to prevent human errors through modeling the system in a certain way. The aim of this paper is to explore the learning process from a different standpoint than those usually applied in organizational learning and error theory. By studying the learning process in Swedish health care I seek to discover how theoretical presumptions affect the outcome in terms of what we actually learn. The theoretical framework draws on two major discussions in contemporary political science; the question of structure and agency and the question of whether to focus on formal or informal structures when explaining organizational behavior.The investigation shows that Swedish health care tend to understand human errors as a result of formal organizational structure. Such a view leads to insufficient explanations to why errors occur but is useful in producing preventative measures.

This thesis focuses on politically active women within The Swedish Social Democratic Women?s Association, also known as S-women. By applying discourse analysis to interviews with active s-women and to meeting conversations between the association?s members, the study approaches ideas of feminism, feminist politics and political commitment. ?Solidarity? ? the central concept of the labour movement ? serves as the point of departure for a feminist discussion about class, gender, ethnicity and age/generation.

Partly as a reaction to a perceived crisis in contemporary democracy, the nineties witnessed an upsurge in different forms of citizens? fora, dedicated to the promotion of increased participation by the citizen in the political process. Youth councils are a special point in case as they entail the general characteristics of a deliberative forum, with an emphasis on political learning. This study aims to undertake an evaluation of a regional youth council in the region of Skåne in the south of Sweden. Through qualitative analysis, the study aims to portray the origin, purposes and consequences of such a forum.

The aim of this thesis is to seek understanding of which images there are about the ?others? in the society. For this study, four women in the ages of 21-23 years old were interviewed during April 2005. The empirical material was analysed with Laclaus and Mouffes discourse analysis. One conclusion is that the images of the ?immigrant? and the ?immigrant women? are created opposite to the ?Swedes? and the ?Swedish women?.

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.

In 2002 the local council of Lund, Sweden, decides to implement the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. A number of actors, such as the state, the civil society, the political society and the bureaucracy, participate in the political process with different authority and points of departure. This thesis studies the actors´ interactions from an inside perspective by applying concepts such as political power, democracy and implementation. The methodological departure is action research from within, a local NGO, the local board of Save the Children Sweden. The results of the study indicate that governance and steering of the implementation process at the communal level is weak.

The overall purpose with this thesis has been to study the strategic development of the Swedish Green Party, Miljöpartiet de Gröna. From its first appearance in the Swedish parliament 1988 to its decision to cooperate with the Social Democrats and the Left Party in 1998, the Greens has gone from a radical antiparty to a pragmatic support party. The analysis has concentrated towards identifying the causal factors behind this strategic move made by the Greens, and to determine how this party change has affected the party's strategic goals. In order to do so, a qualitative case study has been conducted where an integrated theoretical approach has been used. By studying official statements and internal debates the thesis concludes that the strategic change made by the Greens was due to the evolvement of a new dominant coalition of within the party.

Domestic violence against women is a widespread problem around the world, this study aims to investigate Swedish men?s attitudes towards this problem. To investigate this I have done a historic overview of the political attitude change and I interviewed two ethnic Swedish men and two men with a foreign background, this because to get a fair representation of our multicultural society. The results and conclusions is that the attitude haven?t changed that much over the years, it is mostly the latest decades that politicians and the medial debate have acknowledge the imbalance of power between the genders and that the patriarchy is a major factor towards this attitude.The interviewed showed that the men with foreign background had a tendency to have more traditionally attitude towards women then the Swedish men..

The health care is an important part of the welfare services in Sweden. Therefore it is of large interest that it is well performing. A part of this is related to how the health care is organized. This essay examines how the Swedish health care has been organized between 1960 and 1990 and what organizational changes that have been made to the health care. It shows that the Swedish health care has un-dergone many organizational changes the last decades.

In this examination project I look into what ways upper secondary school students conceive themselves as politically influenced before they voted for the general election of 2010. The purpose is to examine which influences the upper secondary school surroundings and the classes of civic education are contributing with to students before they voted. As a method, I have used personal, semi-structural interviews on eight upper secondary school students who all voted for a party represented in the parliament. I have asked questions about how they believe their parents, the surroundings of their school and the classes of civic education have influenced them. To separate which influences primarily the upper secondary school and the classes of civic educations have had on the students, I have selected two comparison groups of four students in each.