The current election is causing a debate in the Swedish media. The parties are trying to convince voters by spreading interesting and informative messages through different kind of media. Social media has emerged as a new way of reaching voters. All the current parliamentary parties have implemented this communication channel into their marketing strategy. People have both admired and judged the channel´s applicability in election campaigns.

Regionalization has become a catchphrase in European countries during the last twenty years with the establishment of the European Union. An ideational development has occurred during time towards emphasing more politicially powerful regions with the idea of new regionalism. Sweden represents a deviant case study, where regions historically have been politically weak and where Sweden has been characterized as a strong unitary state. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political debate in the Swedish parliament concerning the implementation of a stronger regional level (storregioner) during 2007-2010 and to determine if the debate can be characterized as a case of depoliticalization. The theory of depoliticalization have been introduced by Richard Katz and Peter Mair to explain why political parties through external pressure from europeanisation and globalization tend to become more consensual with similar political agendas, leading to a diminished the lef-right scale.

The values politicians relate with public administration are likely to affect the way that they want the public administration to be organised. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine which values Swedish parliamentary parties relate with public administration and more particularly how they emphasise these values.The study is conducted as an analysis of theoretically relevant bills that the government party and the parliamentary parties have introduced to the Riksdag, and reports and statements of opinion from the parliamentary committees. The documents are from the Riksdag´s sessions from 2000/01 to 2005/06. After examining the documents the conclusion can be drawn that the value that is most emphasised during the period is legal security. This might mean that legal security will have more influence on the decisions taken about the organisation of Swedish public administration..

Regionalization has become a catchphrase in European countries during the last twenty years with the establishment of the European Union. An ideational development has occurred during time towards emphasing more politicially powerful regions with the idea of new regionalism. Sweden represents a deviant case study, where regions historically have been politically weak and where Sweden has been characterized as a strong unitary state. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political debate in the Swedish parliament concerning the implementation of a stronger regional level (storregioner) during 2007-2010 and to determine if the debate can be characterized as a case of depoliticalization. The theory of depoliticalization have been introduced by Richard Katz and Peter Mair to explain why political parties through external pressure from europeanisation and globalization tend to become more consensual with similar political agendas, leading to a diminished the lef-right scale.

Regionalization has become a catchphrase in European countries during the last twenty years with the establishment of the European Union. An ideational development has occurred during time towards emphasing more politicially powerful regions with the idea of new regionalism. Sweden represents a deviant case study, where regions historically have been politically weak and where Sweden has been characterized as a strong unitary state. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political debate in the Swedish parliament concerning the implementation of a stronger regional level (storregioner) during 2007-2010 and to determine if the debate can be characterized as a case of depoliticalization. The theory of depoliticalization have been introduced by Richard Katz and Peter Mair to explain why political parties through external pressure from europeanisation and globalization tend to become more consensual with similar political agendas, leading to a diminished the lef-right scale.

The focus of this study is the ways in which the discourses of the three largest right-wing populist parties in Scandinavia ? Danish Dansk Folkeparti, Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet and Swedish Sverigedemokraterna ? are articulated and on defining which individuals they include and exclude. The discourses of the three parties are compared and analyzed to determine whether they constitute specific nationalist and culturally racist discourses. The problem is addressed by applying a social constructivist theory of nationalism and cultural racism, and specifically the binary opposition ?we? and ?them?, on a material consisting of the respective parties? member magazines from 2007.

In 2010 Swedish political parties used commercials broadcasted on TV for the first time in order to gain votes in a general election. In connection with the election the parties were criticized for not succeeding to formulate a story to the voters that conveyed how they wanted to change Sweden. In this paper I use central concepts from rhetoric, storytelling, postmodernism and psychology to formulate three demands each on the narrator, the story and its reception. Using the resulting image of what distinguishes a good narrator, a good story and a good reception as a starting point, I investigate to what extent the critique was justified. My findings indicate that the degree to which the commercials fulfill these demands vary greatly.

Purpose The purpose is to analyze the parliamentary parties political communication in the social media channels before the election 2010.Methodology This essay is a descriptive study from nine interviews of the responsible people in the parliamentary parties. In addition to that two more interviews were done with social media expertsTheoretical perspective This essay is based on two-way communication and communication strategiesConclusions The parliamentary parties use social media as a complement to traditional media. The purpose is to create dialog and to minimize the gap to the voters, but in many ways it is being used as a one-way communication channel.  The parliamentary parties are trying to use the social media channels in Swedish conditions, but in many ways they try to imitate an American used strategy..

This thesis explores the decisions behind swedish principals to permit or prohibit political parties from visiting schools. Through a series of semistructured qualitative interviews with five respondents from different high schools, insights were gathered into their motivations regarding political party visits to schools. The results indicate that principals view political party visits as significant for fostering civic engagement, aligned with the school's democratic mission. However, some principals opt to prohibit such visits due to concerns about non democratic values and potential disruptions. Practical considerations like safety, logistical issues, and conflict risks are also crucial in their decision-making, highlighting awareness of potential challenges posed by political visits.

This study focuses on the social medium Facebook. Its intention is to examine the contents of the Facebook statuses the Swedish parliament parties chose to publish in the final two weeks before the parliamentary elections in 2010. The key concepts used in the analysis are interactivity and multimodality. Aspects to be explored are interactivity of their status updates and how the parties used various multimodal objects. A comparison of the parties' usage also follows.

On the 17th of January 2002 the Swedish government presented a bill to theSwedish parliament, proposing ways of strengthening the Swedish democracythrough reforms for increased elements of participatory democracy. A publicreport on the state of the Swedish democracy had been released two years earlierwith similar enthusiasm for participatory democracy. However, the participatoryideals of these two documents were strongly criticised by a group of scholars.The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the arguments articulatedbetween the years 2000 and 2002 by the actors mentioned above, and to examinetheir relation to arguments concerning political participation, articulated bythinkers from previous times. By classifying the arguments into different groupsdepending on their content I find that both parties in the Swedish argumentationfocus on the effects of participatory democracy on political equality, on theefficiency of the political decision-making and the quality of the decisions beingmade, and finally on the personal character of the citizens. Among the argumentsarticulated by thinkers from previous times, similarities with the Swedishargumentation can be seen as well as important differences.

The purpose of this study is to investigate if reconciliation between former war-enemies and ethnic groups (Muslims, Croats and Serbs) in Bosnia and Hercegovina is possible today. Reconciliation between these groups is necessary for the development of the state and sustainable peace. In order to fulfil the aim I have applied qualitative conversation interviews together with qualitative literature study.In this research I have studied the three largest parties (SDA, HDZ and SDS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Conversation interviews were made with two representatives of each party. The reconciliation theory and the recommendations that the theory advocates were used in the study.

The debate about affirmative action for ethnic minorities in countries with another majority culture is growing bigger in many parts of the world. However, it is often the debate misses the aborigines within the countries? borders. The aim of this paper is to investigate the possible conflict in opinions for xenophobic political parties when managing an aborigine population. I will use a qualitative method to study the ethnic minority Sámi in Sweden, Norway and Finland, and afterwards xenophobic parties view on them.To reach a result will I present a scale over Xenophobia ? Cosmopolitanism, which is described as a political cleavage.

BackgroundPolitics in some ways has always been about communication and marketing. In Sweden some people believe that communication and meaningful relations with the voters are of no value, instead it is the political content that is of importance. Media evolution has changed the conditions of political marketing; this has meant that the choices of the right communication channels in political marketing have become more important today than ever. Political competition in Sweden has become more even in recent years, this has called for political communication and marketing to be more planed and well thought out. Political parties have therefore begun to spend millions on marketing themselves.

Knowledge is frequently discussed in modern society, and has been since ancient Greece. Our goal is to examine the content of two political documents with the desire to point out their visions about how the Swedish school system should be shaped, in relations to knowledge. More precise this essay is going to concentrate on two specific political parties, Folkpartiet and Vansterpartiet and their official programs on the subject school and education, to see what they say about knowledge. The choice is made on the basis that these parties political standings differ most from each other, in the left/right scale in politics. The qualitative analysis takes its main base from Aristotels concepts of knowledge; Episteme, techne and fronesis, and Bernt Gustavssons modern defenitions of them.