Suchergebnisse

Why do people engage in high-cost political activities such as forming new political parties? Start-up costs are high. Moreover, rewards are unclear and uncertain. Since political parties are collective goods, people demanding new political parties face a collective action problem. It is therefore somewhat puzzling that new parties emerge. Drawing on theories from economics, sociology and political science, I argue that we, in order to understand the emergence of new parties, need to analytically move in on party-entrepreneurs to elucidate what motivates them. Methodologically inspired by the debate on bridging the gap between deductive and inductive strategies, I process-trace and compare three cases. The case studies identify individual level-mechanisms producing the decision toform a new party. People that voice demands within established parties, and face outright rejection, have experienced bad treatment from established politicians. These experiences contribute to disappointment, anger, and a sense of indignation - i.e. "intense emotions"- that mobilize entrepreneurs. Intense emotions create a lust for revenge, which becomes a psychological selective incentive, and is important for understanding why people engage themselves in high-cost political activities. ; Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv

Comparative research emphasize Social Democratic parties as leading political forces when universal welfare states are reformed in accordance with market-oriented principles. Considering the traditional portrayal of universal welfare states as an institutional feature of Nordic political economics, which tends to favor the Social Democrats in the political power struggle, this is a highly surprising conclusion. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, that Social Democratic market reforms are caused by economic constraints, this article postulate reforms to be conducted for political & strategic purposes. The theoretical argument goes like this: Social Democrat governments decide upon reforms when the parry-elite perceive policy problems as potential threats to the legitimacy of the universal welfare state. Hence, market-oriented reforms are expected to re-invigorate the legitimacy of the universal welfare institutions. For political institutions to be efficient power resources they are requited to be deemed legitimate by a democratic constituency. Otherwise they can work counterproductive in the ongoing power-struggle. The theory is tested empirically in a structured comparison of Swedish & Danish school policy in the 1990s, & is confirmed with some slight modifications. References. Adapted from the source document.

As a consequence in internationalization and general trends in publishing, compilation theses, a form of publication relatively new to the political science field, are likely to become increasingly common. Those specializing in social sciences disciplines such as psychology and economics have had more experience in dealing with this type of publication. Based on their experiences, it is possible to unite on certain guidelines when evaluating publication quality. A compilation thesis should typically include from three to five scholarly contributions. At least one contribution should be self-authored. It should be clear what portion of the writing has been contributed by the doctoral candidate. Contributions should deal with a common overall theme. The beginning summary of the thesis should be carefully evaluated for its effectiveness in pointing out gaps in earlier research on the topic under discussion and for the pulling together of contributions. Esaiasson discusses how some years ago teaching staff at the Goteborg Institute developed a set of evaluation guidelines but notes that the institute hasn't produced compilation theses in recent years, so the guidelines havent yet been tested in actual practice. Further discussion is needed concerning the criteria for evaluating this emerging type of publication. Adapted from the source document.

Today's mathematics education has an impact even outside the confines of the classroom, not least through the relevance of mathematics in culture, economics, politics and in relation to power. Sociopolitical perspectives in mathematics didactic research provide insights into how education in mathematics is social and political. Research based on these perspectives suggests both critical questioning and not-yet-imagined possibilities for content, teaching, policy and further research. This book introduces, for a larger Swedish audience, the research orientations and strategies that sociopolitical perspectives have to offer. In the book, this is illustrated in several ways. The chapters describe current research on the socio-political challenges of mathematics education in several different contexts, e.g. classrooms, after-school programs, curricula, mathematics teacher education and even mathematics education research. In this way, perspectives are broadened to groups of people, institutions and forces, which constitute a network of mathematics education practice. The chapters present different philosophical and empirical studies, based on theoretical tools from philosophy, social science and cultural studies, critical studies of education and socio-cultural-political studies of mathematics education. Methodological and analytical strategies such as text and discourse analysis and case studies of practice are used. In this way, opportunities to research mathematics education based on socio-political perspectives are illustrated. The chapters use various writing styles which invite the reader into the world of research. Thus, the reader will encounter different ways of thinking about the role of mathematics education in the creation of modern Swedish society.

Enligt den svenska förvaltningstraditionen, vilken bygger på den Weberianska byråkratimodellen, ska politiker fatta beslut och tjänstemännen verkställa dem. Men, relationen mellan politiker och tjänstemän i den kommunala vardagen förefaller inte vara så enkel. Förtroendevalda politiker upplever ett problem med att tjänstemännen har för stor makt, vilket leder till ett inflytande på den politiska processen som inte står i proportion till deras formella position. Problemet bottnar i att den Weberianska byråkratimodellen inte längre fungerar som ett vägledande ideal i praktiken. Den kommunala vardagen karakteriseras istället av en otydlighet i hur makten i praktiken konstitueras och distri-bueras i relationen mellan politiker och tjänstemän, med resultat att icke-förtroendevalda chefstjänstemän kan hamna i en maktsituation där de kommer i besittning av, förutom sin legitima chefsmakt, en reell politisk makt. Som en följd av detta kan våra svenska kommuner komma att ledas av en profession som tränger undan och kanske i praktiken övertar politisk ledning – en profession som enligt den Weberianska byråkratimodellen formellt ska vara politiskt maktlösa. Mot bakgrund av detta syftar studien till att bidra till kunskapen om de kommunala chefstjänstemännens politiska agerande och de maktförhållanden som konstituerar detta agerande. Med makt avses i avhandlingen en kapacitet att handla som ägs av agenter och som kan identifieras i kraft av chefspositionens varaktiga relationer med underliggande sociala strukturer mellan politik och förvaltning, mellan politiker och tjänstemän. Makt betraktas följaktligen som en förklaringsfaktor för att förstå chefstjänstemännens politiska agerande. Avhandlingen baseras på en fallstudie av kommunchefer, dvs. kommunens ledande tjänsteman som befinner sig i den omedelbara närheten av den kommunövergripande politiska ledningen, och som därigenom verkar i gränslandet mellan politik och administration. För att bidra till denna kunskap utvecklas i avhandlingen en analysmodell med utgångspunkt i den kritiska realismens synsätt på sociala strukturer och kausalitet. Modellen baseras på tre olika typer av analyser, en strukturell analys, en kausal analys och en förståelseanalys. Med hjälp av den strukturella analysen identifieras tre stycken strukturella maktresurser som kan ses som förbundna med den kommunala chefstjänstemannapositionen. Dessa benämns centralitet, kontroll över kritiska resurser, och närhet till makt. Med hjälp av den kausala analysen studeras vad och hur dessa maktresurser tillåter innehavaren av chefstjänstemannapositionen att påverka för att uppnå effekter. Analysen visar att de strukturella maktresurserna möjliggör för chefstjänstemannen att påverka hela den politiska beslutsprocessen genom att med rätt timing i ärendehanteringen, och de beslutsunderlag som ligger bakom detta, presentera olika problembilder och konsekvensbeskrivningar. Med hjälp av förståelseanalysen studeras chefstjänste-männens politiska agerande. Med utgångspunkt i en kritisk realistisk ansats kan de kommunala chefstjänstemännens politiska agerande förstås i termer av en proaktiv politisk roll som är inneboende i chefspositionens generiska karaktär. Den proaktiva rollen är intimt sammanlänkad med strukturella maktresurser genom det att den för sin existens kräver strukturella maktresurser som är förbundna med den kommunala chefstjänstemannapositionen. ; Politicians are meant to make decisions and administrators are supposed to execute them according to the Swedish public administration tradition; a tradition built on the Weberian bureaucracy model. But, power relations between politicians and administrators in municipal practice do not appear as unambiguous as the tradition purports. Administrators have too much power according to elected officials, which in turn have an impact on the political process that is not consistent with the administrators' formal position. This causes tension in the relations between politicians and administrators. The problem seems to stem from the fact that the Weberian bureaucracy model no longer serves as a guiding ideal in practice. Instead the local government practice is characterized by how vaguely the power is constituted and distributed in the social relation between politicians and administrators, resulting in the fact that non-elected public managers find themselves in a power position encompassing not only their legitimate managerial power, but also real political power – which is not consistent with the ideal bureaucracy model according to which this type of power is reserved only for elected officials. As a result the Swedish municipalities may be run by a profession that in practice take over the political leadership; a profession that in keeping with the Weberian ideal model is supposed to be powerless. This dissertation aims to contribute to field of knowledge concerning the municipal administrators' political actions and the power relations constituting this behaviour. For the purpose of this dissertation the term power intends a capacity to act inherent in agents and that can be identified by virtue of the managerial position's lasting relations with underlying social structures between politics and administration, between politicians and public administrators. Power is thus looked upon as an element of explanation in understanding public managers political behaviour. The dissertation is based on a case study of municipal managers, i e the leading public administrator in a municipality who is in the immediate proximity to the overall political leadership and thereby serves in the borderland between politics and administration. A model of analysis is developed with its basis in the critical realism's approach on social structures and causality- The model is based on three different types of analyses, a structural analysis, a causal analysis, and an analysis of understanding. The structural analysis helps identify three structural power resources that are associated with the municipal management position; centrality, control over critical resources, and nearness to power. By means of the causal analysis one studies what and how these power resources permit the holder of the managerial position to influence in order to achieve certain effects. The analysis shows that the structural power resources make it possible for the public managers to influence the political decision making process through right timing in delivering official documents, along with the decision support data, presenting different problem areas and consequences of these. With the support of the analysis of understanding the municipal manager's political behaviour is studied. With reference to a critical realist approach the answer is that the public managers' political behaviour can be understood in terms of a proactive political role inherent in the managerial positions generic character. The role is strictly interconnected with the structural power resources due to the fact that the role requires, for its existence, structural power resources as are associated with the municipal managerial position.

Biodiversity loss can degrade ecosystems and impactthe ability of ecosystems to contribute to people. The last 20 years of ecosystem service research has increased society's interest in fighting the consequences of ecosystem degradation. During the last decades, attitudes towards conservation have been shaped in many ways. According to Mace (2014), "nature for itself" was a key principle during 1960s–1970s supporting concepts such as protected and wilderness areas. Human pressures on nature during the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in extinctions, habitat loss, and pollution, which made it urgent to act for"nature despite of people". That period was followed by a "nature for people" period, in which biodiversity challenges were mainstreamed via concepts such as ecosystem approach, ecosystem services and economic values. The latest paradigm, which was developed by Mace (2014) is called "people and nature". Key concepts in conservation circles include environmental change, resilience, adaptability and socio-ecological systems. Several assessments of the state and trends of biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services have been carried out via various initiatives, such as Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2005), followed by the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) assessments and the Aichi biodiversity targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In Europe, Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) has generated a lot of new knowledge on the quantification of ecosystem services and use of this information in decision-making. Today, more and more open data is available through research infrastructures, for example, remote sensing data through the Copernicus programme of the European Union and European Space Agency. Naturebased solutions and green and blue infrastructure are becoming popular in landscape planning and highlight different aspects of the socio-ecological (synon. coupled human-environment) systems and their sustainable management. The most significant attempt to highlight the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services globally, has been the establishment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES has launched a series of thematic and geographical assessments. The European and Central Asian regional assessment has been ongoing parallel to this Nordic IPBES-like assessment that has focused on coastal ecosystems and their services. This assessment covers the Nordic countries, i.e. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and autonomous areas such as Åland, Faroe Islands and Greenland, which are a unique "biocultural" piece of Earth with unique nature values and well-established societies.

From 1960 and onwards the Swedish tax system has gradually changed from mostly progressive to mostly proportional and heavily dependent on taxation on consumer goods. This dissertation aims to describe and explain the role of Social Democracy in this process by studying the forming and further development of the omsättningsskatt, later transformed to a proper value added tax mervärdesskatt (VAT), from an historical institutional perspective. Previous research has considered these taxes as mainly financing tools, linked to the building of the well-fare state. While taxes are crucial in the financing of public expenditure, I claim a more complex background to the consumer tax, thereby highlighting a neo-corporative income political setting, hitherto not paid attention to, between a Social Democratic Government and the Trade Union Confederation (LO). Empirically the dissertation covers a period from the late 1950:s up to 2006. Drawing on an extensive material, including protocols from the major decision-making bodies within the Social Democratic Party, I demonstrate how Social Democracy, in a constant interplay between the two power centres, Government and LO, has formed a tax structure closely aligned with LO income political goals of closing the gap between blue and white-collar workers. In the formative moment, LO agreed to restrain wages and was rewarded by targeted cuts in income tax, transfer payments and an extensive labour market policy, made possible by the new tax. In the years to come the resulting informal institutional structure was increasingly strained as tactical-strategical considerations tempted the Government to use the tax instruments for vote- and office-seeking purposes. Not without difficulties both parties, however, succeeded in upholding the informal institutional arrangements until 1986 when internal discontent within LO set forces in motion. Social Democratic tax policy, until now considered beneficial for trade union members, was rejected and in conjunction with an ideational paradigmatic shift towards supply-side economics, the institution was pushed towards a critical junction and a new institutional setting. The VAT-ties to LO were eventually cut, permitting the Government to align the VAT-policy with an overriding goal of office-seeking through alliance building. From 1991 and onwards a highly political- strategical VAT-policy has thus resulted not only in a differentiated VAT, but also in numerous tax cuts on minor items of symbolic importance to various political parties. The strategy has hollowed the tax revenues but proved successful in forging and upholding temporary political alliances in Parliament. The main empirical findings – the presence of a neo-corporatist income policy and the pursuing of a class-based tax policy – departs from earlier research and shed new light on what we call "The Swedish model". The institutional conclusions are, however, in line with an historical institutional perspective stressing the importance of a formative moment, path dependency, ideas as agents of change and the theory of gradual institutional development, a theory that might benefit from further theorising in the interplay between formal and informal veto points.

In this dissertation, the Swedish transport aid constitutes a case study with the aim of empirically testing the presence of institutional path dependency. In New Institutional Economics the concept institutional path dependency is used for analyzing why institutions that do not promote growth are developed even when better solutions are available. In this study, institutional path dependency is defined in the following way: institutional path dependency is when new institutional conditions develop in a way that maintains an economic and social practice within the sector of the economy that the institutional condition regulates. The transport aid was introduced in 1971 and is a part of Swedish regional policy. The transport aid is allocated to certain goods-producing companies in northern Sweden in order to subsidize their cost of transportation. The aim was that these companies would strengthen their ability to compete in markets in southern Sweden and abroad. In order to perform a test of the existence of path dependency, three criteria for path dependence were defined. The first of these criteria is that new institutional conditions arise with a maintained practice within the regulated sector. The second criterion for path dependency is that the institutional condition subsists when there are other alternatives which are better and well-known from the point of view of public economy. A third criterion for path dependency is that an institutional condition is given a new legitimacy when interest groups state new motives for it. The study has shown that a practice from the previous traffic policy has lived on in the institutional condition of the transport aid, through a continued subsidization of the cost of transportation similar to a historical tradition in early railway policy (for example in the Norrland tariff). A relatively large part of the transport aid has in practice been subsidizing transports of relatively unprocessed goods, which was a reason for the criticism that the transport aid received in previous studies. A practice from earlier traffic policy, which entailed leveled costs of transportation, has been difficult to combine in practice with goals from regional policy that have emphasized growth and industrial development. This indicates a path dependent development of the transport aid, since it's practice seems to be related to another "path" than main stream regional policy. Since the transport aid was continuously criticized in parliamentary reports and debates for conserving the economic structure in the support area and for distorting the competition on the transport market, there was probably a certain pressure to change the transport aid or replace it with other measures that were more neutral with regard to competition. This pressure of change was brought to a head in the parliamentary resolution from 1990, when the Government suggested radical changes in the design and organization of the transport aid. The Government bill was however rejected by Parliament, and the transport aid continued in the same form as before. Therefore, the transport aid has not followed changes in regional policy at large, neither with regard to organization nor formal goals, in spite of the fact that both the Government and the officials in the Transport Council (the administrative organization) have urged on an adjustment of the transport aid to fit the general direction of the regional policy at large. If the general direction of the regional policy in the 80s and 90s reflects a more growth oriented economic policy, then the transport aid has resisted institutional change, in spite of the fact that better and more well-known alternatives have existed with regard to promoting growth. The second criterion for institutional path dependency may therefore be considered fulfilled. Interest groups have on several occasions expanded the base for legitimacy of the transport aid by presenting new arguments to support it. One example of expanded legitimacy is that the transport aid was directed towards small and medium-sized companies in the 1980s. Such arguments were not presented when the transport aid was introduced in 1970, but was later emphasized by members of the Center Party and the Social Democratic Party. An interesting aspect of this institutional change is that the new motives also were characterized by ideological preferences for equality, since the transport aid with the help of this change would be able to support small firms in their competition with large firms in the same sector. This supports the assertion that the legitimacy of the transport aid has been derived from informal ideological preferences for equality rather than ideological preferences for growth, though the formal goals for the transport aid have been growth related. The conclusion is consequently that interest groups over time have managed to establish a stronger ideological legitimacy for the transport aid. All three criteria for institutional path dependency can therefore be considered fulfilled in the case of the transport aid. ; digitalisering@umu