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.

Deliberative democracy theory has been prominent within political science research since the early 1990?s, often applied in studies on postnational democratic constellations, in particular the European Union. Of the main institutions of the union, the European Parliament stands out as somewhat understudied from this point of view, which is why the main aim of this thesis is to study the conditions for deliberative democracy in the European Parliament.From deliberative democratic theory four criteria have been selected to function as methodological framework in analysing the institutional structure and proceedings of the parliament. Each of the criteria is applied separately to the practice and function of the plenary sessions, the parliamentary committees and the political groups. The analysis shows that the conditions for deliberative democracy differ between the three fora, as do their respective roles in parliament, but all in all they supplement each other.

Few issues have been exposed in media recently as much as the climate change issue. Afterthe documentary film ?An Inconvenient Thruth? presented by Al Gore was released in 2006,most of the world saw a lot of attention directed towards global warming. This was a turningpoint that is refered to in this dissertation an history-graded critical event, which is assumed tohave a significant impact on peoples lives.The purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether or not political parties in Swedenresponded to this critical event in the way that they, in their party programmes, haveformulated policies related to climate change. Alternatively if media produces an image ofpolitical activity which does not comport with the forming of actual political standpoints.

AbstractEssay in political science, C-level, by Line Säll, spring semester 2007.Tutor: Susan Marton.?To do things by the rule of law -A study in the discretion of front-line bureaucrats?This essay has it´s starting-point in the theoretical problem of social science to unite democracy and bureaucracy. The purpose is to illustrate the problems with the discretion of front-line bureaucrats in a democratic state. The theoretical approach is front-line bureaucracy-theory. Certain characteristics of the work of street-level bureaucrats makes it impossible to severly reduce discretion.

In Sweden the social assistance from a historical perspective, has been a part of the social legislation, since the 18th century. In that time called poor relief. Through the centuries this has established the social assistance we have today. With focus on the child, we have attempted to illustrate how the social workers consider the child perspective when they are dealing with the social assistance. We wanted to get a view of how the social worker reasons about needs the children have and how they can see that the benefit has been provided for.

This essay will try to explain and compare the different development steps which Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have taken after the war. How could countries with such similar backgrounds develop in such different ways? By analyzing and comparing the two countries the purpose was to examine how these countries which had so much in common could develop in so different ways. My two questions are: What similarities and differences are there between the development which Bosnia and Croatia have taken after the war? Why have Croatia succeeded and not Bosnia?My analysis showed that the main reason to the difference between these countries was that Bosnia is divided; all ethnic groups in Bosnia only consider what's best for their own ethnic group and not what's best for the country. Croatia however has expelled the Serbs which made it easier for them to have a succesfull democratic development. .

In this essay my aim is to examine how the term utanförskap is constructed and defined as a social problem in the public arena of the Swedish Parliament. The term utanförskap was widely used in the election-campaign prior to the Swedish Parliament election in the year 2006. The term, mainly articulated by the Right-wing Alliance, was used to describe indi-viduals and groups that were depicted as being outside the Swedish society. In the political debate, work and benefit dependency were constructed as binary opposites, with the latter describing the individuals in utanförskap. Translated to English the term utanförskap would be something like ?the state of being outside? or ?outsidership?.

The aim of this study is to examine how young people look at and perceive drugs by studying how they discuss and reason about drugs. The essay's main interest is not whether young people use drugs or not. We are primarily interested in how young people talk about drugs. The questions that we want to get answered are:What are the beliefs that young people have about drugs, drug use and drug users? More specifically we seek answers to which images, symbols and attributes that young people links to drugs, drug use and drug users.What is important in young people's construction of beliefs about drugs and drug users? More specifically, which are the information sources and reference groups that young people assigns significance?We used focus group interviews as the research method.

This study aims to investigate and describe the direction of the ideological development of the Swedish gymnastics association Gymniska Förbundet. Between 1928 and 1932, this organization transformed from a purely gymnastic and cultural association into an influential platform for the production of Swedish nationalist ideology. Based on theories of National Socialism?s formation within modern society, the analysis focus on the conditions regulating Gymniska Förbundets relation to modernity. Thus the study examines the association?s ideas in relationship to the concept of modernity.

Since criminality started to rise steeply in most western welfare states following the second world war the relationship between welfare support and criminality has been debated. For a period of time thought to be an effective preventive measure against crime welfare support has since from time to time come to be seen by some as ineffective and in some cases even as a contributing factor to the rise in crime. It remains a contested issue as new theories, such as social support theory, which is employed here, attempt to contribute to the understanding of what effects general welfare has on overall crime levels. As a connection which is relatively well-researched in the USA, altough still not yet fully understood, this study strives toward a better understanding by testing the relationship in a swedish context. The relationship might not function in the same way considering that the US is a fundamentally different welfare-regime than Sweden, liberal and social-democratic respectively.Untangling the relationship is attempted by employing a multivariate regressionanalysis on a crosssectional dataset consisting of data from 2012 covering 247 of Swedens total of 290 municipalities.

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.

The aim of this thesis is to seek understanding to how a national identity is constructed. Five women and five men at the age of 21-37 years old have been interviewed during November 2005 and January 2006. All of them lived Oslo at the time. The informants have been divided into two groups, `Swedish immigrants` and `Norwegian immigrants`, none of the people interviewed is ethnic `Swedish` or `Norwegian`. The empirical material has been analysed with the help of Billig´s theory about banal nationalism and Laclau and Mouffe´s discourse analysis.

The purpose of this study was to examine the controversy surrounding the Swedish methadone assisted rehabilitation program over time. Which course has the Swedish methadone assisted rehabilitation program, and the controversy surrounding it, taken since the start? Which arguments have been for and which have been against a methadone assisted rehabilitation program in Sweden, and what are these arguments based on? We chose to write this thesis as a literature study to get a broad and in depth picture of the development of the program in Sweden. In our analysis we used social constructionism and a medical aspect on substance abuse as theories.It is clear that it has been, and still are, differences in opinions when it comes to the effects of the program. As early as in the 1980's the methadone assisted rehabilitation program was scientifically proved effective and approved by the Swedish Board of Health and Social Affairs.

This essay is about persons who have had social assistance and the individual?s experiences of social assistance. The focus is on how the individual develops in a new life situation and if and how they are motivated to get out of it. The essay has an individual perspective where the relation between society and the individual is important. The result is based on four qualitative interviews with a hermeneutic perspective.

This study is about the work of including immigrants to the Swedish society. The reason that we chose Landskrona community is that it is a town with a high population of immigrants. The purpose of this work has been to examine how projectleaders reflect about the work of integration in Landskrona and their point of view regarding the term integration. Our questions were: what is the projectleaders view on the term integration, how does the projectleaders reflect about the work of integration in Landskrona, how would the projectleaders like the work of integration to be, how does the projecleaders reflect about the future work of integration in Landskrona.We used a qualitative method to do this study and interviewed six persons who all work in various projects, that are working for including immigrants to the Swedish society.Our main results in our study is various kinds of thoughts and reflections of the work of integration in Landskrona, but there were some things that were more approaching than others. There is a high ambition of integrate immigrants into the Swedish society in Landskrona and the projectleaders had all many reflections of their work.