At Ifpra's World Congress in Hong Kong, the decision was taken to set up a new Scientific Task Force (STF). One of the main activities of this Task Force is to provide state-of-the-art knowledge on different aspects of parks. A major challenge is of course to find scientific proof for the benefits provided by urban parks, benefits that we often take for granted. In order to make sure that parks are part of political agendas at different levels, sound evidence of park benefits has to be provided. This need can be met by a review of existing scientific literature (best external evidence), carried out in a systematic way. By applying a systematic method the usefulness of such a document will increase, since the findings will meet the standards for evidence-based decisions.
It is rather often assumed that Swedish foreign policy debate is largely characterized by consensus and that foreign policy goals often are material (for example security or economic welfare). Despite this, it is possible to identify disagreement among political parties about ideological goals – i.e. the promotion of values – in Swedish foreign policy debates. This raises questions about the nature and importance of these ideological goals in such debates. To study this closer I investigate foreign policy debates about the military conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq. The purpose of the dissertation is to describe and explain the content and relative importance of the ideological goals expressed by Swedish parliamentary parties in both party and public arenas. Four parties are included in the study: the Left, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Conservatives. The theoretical framework is made up of two main parts. First, I develop a classification scheme to identify and sort the goals found in the empirical material. This scheme includes four goal types: ideological, security, economic, and other. Second, insights from literatures on foreign policy and the behaviour of political parties are used to analyze the content and importance of ideological goals. The research design used in the dissertation is comparative case studies. The empirical material is composed of documents from the internal party arena (meeting minutes, congress material, etc), the parliamentary arena (debate material) and the official arena (press material). The material has been analyzed mainly qualitatively with the help of ideational and argument analysis. In order to estimate the relative importance of ideological goals quantitative content analysis has also been used. As regards the content of ideological goals during debates about Vietnam, the empirical results show all parties discussed the promotion of humanity, democracy and states' rights to national independence. In the Iraq conflict, all parties expressed goals about humanity, human rights, internal security/safety, democracy and states' rights to national independence. Beyond these goals, individual or a few parties also expressed other ideological goals. However, a central result is that the parties have linked the ideological goals – which they often agree about – to different ways of reasoning. The empirical analysis also revealed that ideological goals have generally been more important than other types of goals (with the exception of the Conservative Party in the debate about Vietnam). Regarding developments over time, the importance of ideological goals was unchanged for the Social Democrats and the Liberal Party. For the Left there was a slight decrease, and for the Conservatives a significant increase. The overall conclusion about what explains the content and importance of ideological goals in the foreign policy debates studied here is that explanations at the systemic level are inadequate. Variables like the international political structure (polarity) and institutional mechanisms in the EU and the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy had little explanatory power. Instead, explanations like type of foreign policy issue, party ideology and party strategy were more useful. Differences in parties' fundamental ideological views were also discussed as an important source of difference as regards the positions and arguments that expressed ideological goals.
Stratagems adopted by democratic leaders to try to insinuate, or anchor, a preferred course of action into the larger collective will have a variety of repercussions. Beyond the apparent success of the venture itself, the long-term integrity of the democratic fabric may be at stake if simmering rancour and discontent is left unheeded. These questions would seem particularly pertinent when studying the national side of the evolution of the European Union. The periodic shunting of competencies to European institutions is highly complex, so much so that popular legitimacy for the momentous changes is in effect something of an ephemeral commodity. The referendum, with its unique potential to determine the prevailing vox populi, has from time to time been employed to offset these problems, and lend continued credence to the relinquishment of sovereign power. The political entities that will be the powerhouses in this contest for the hearts and minds of the public are, inevitably, national political parties. They, too, are likely to pay whatever political price will be exacted as a consequence of this unusual form of battle – including the exposition and potential widening of internal rifts. Noticing a dearth of investigative tools that can help us unravel these processes, the author develops a structured framework of analysis specifically designed to "parse" strategic or tactical action, with the aim to gauge likely party-democratic fallout. She makes a first-level distinction between "convincing" strategies (basically conceptualised as compatible with deli¬berative-democratic tenets), and "persuading" strategies (closely associated with a subset of negotiation theory principles focusing on strategic action). While both strategies may lead to the desired short-term outcome – where leadership preferences are duly propagated – a convince/persuade analysis is shown to yield improved understanding of the concomitant, longer-term effects. The author studies the Swedish Social Democratic Party's internal handling of the debates leading up to two pivotal referenda – the EU membership referendum of 1994, and the EMU referendum of 2003. Reviewing a wealth of secondary sources and conducting more than 40 interviews with high-level party officials and other centrally positioned actors (representing both sides of the two issue divides), she is provided with a unique material, which is parsed through the framework (which at this point also proves to be a sound analytical instrument). The study is primarily qualitative in nature, but an entire chapter is devoted to a complementing quantitative analysis where an existing Discourse Quality Index (DQI) is used to determine the level of deliberation prevalent in four party congresses (two preceding the EU referendum; two preceding the EMU referendum). One "convince" sub-dimension, respect, proved to be the one most easily affected by external events, not to mention deadline imposed by the referendum. The qualitative analysis revealed a generally higher level of justification (another "convince" sub-dimension) in the EMU case than in the EU case, and the reverse was true for the respect dimension. In both instances, the party leadership acted to pacify [persuade] the debate, notably by prohibiting government ministers from being active in the respective no-campaigns. A preliminary hypothesis that "deliberative space" shrinks as the final deadline looms was in part corroborated, as turned out to be valid for the respect dimension.
