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This dissertation addresses party-culture in political parties represented in the Swedish parliament. Party-culture is investigated by studying collective self-images and norms in Swedish parliamentary party-groups (PPG). The aim of this investigation is to contribute to understanding of the conditions under which parliamentary work is carried out. In order to expand our understanding of these conditions this dissertation looks beyond the formal processes by which party-groups deliver their political message and make decisions, and instead highlights the cultural aspects of these party organizations in the parliament. The method of analysis is qualitative and the material for the study consists of 53 interviews with members of parliament from all represented parties. The parties studied are thus the Social Democratic, Moderate, Liberal, Christian Democrats, Left, Centre, and Green. In addition, some participant observation for the 1998-2002 mandate period in used. The empirical investigation shows that party-culture is revealed via four basic themes: political ability, feelings of political responsibility, the importance social fellowship, and the party's strength in relation to individual party members. The party's culture based on the four themes noted above provides a theoretical structure for interpretation that combines an Aristotelian idea about basic knowledge types, sophia and phronesis, with cultural theorists Mary Douglas' grid-group-analysis. Based on this interpretation method it is shown that party-cultures distinguish themselves from each other in a way that diverges from the left-right spectrum that dominates Swedish politics. At the same time as the parties demonstrate differences in party-culture, there are also some similarities between the parties, and these similarities suggest that the parties have adjusted themselves to a more general culture within the parliament, most visibly the focus on factual knowledge and a certain requirement for modesty from party members. ; Konverterat ISBN: 978-91-554-5882-9

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

During much of the 20th century, the national party systems of Western Europe remained largely unchanged. However, beginning in the 1970s, these frozen party systems slowly started to melt. As the number of parties has increased, the question of what explains new party entrance has also attracted more scholarly interest. Despite this increased attention, the study of new political parties still suffers from a structuralist bias. The implication is that the fates of new parties are decided almost exclusively by external factors. Some scholars focus on the institutional environment; others emphasize sociological explanations, such as the formation of new cleavages in society. Yet such non-actor-centred perspectives risk being excessively deterministic. They also struggle to explain why some parties succeed in gaining entrance to legislatures while others, seemingly under the same external circumstances, fail. In this thesis, therefore, a new way to study parties and their path to parliament is proposed. Starting with the notion that external conditions alone cannot explain new party entrance, the thesis takes an agency-based perspective. Three sets of strategies are identified as being important means for a party to influence its chances of getting into parliament. They concern the party's resources, its political project and its external relations. In what ways can supply and management of resources, policies and relations with other parties affect the potential for becoming a parliamentary party? Through four in-depth case studies of new entrants into the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag, the thesis concludes that there are some important commonalities in their paths to parliament. Especially with regard to their resources and their political project, the empirical evidence supports the initial premise: new party entrance is unthinkable without successful strategic behaviour.

Focusing on national election campaigns in Sweden, this study examines how candidates' political networks may influence who becomes member of Parliament in a flexible list system. Flexible list systems enable candidates placed on a non-eligible seat during the nomination process within the party organization, to still get elected via the voters' optional preferential votes. The data used is derived from a unique survey including a total sample of candidates elected to the Swedish Parliament 1998–2014 via preferential votes after being placed on a non-eligible seat during the nomination process. The data also includes acquaintances to these candidates defined as their political networks. The method used to track down the network members, was to ask the candidates for acquaintances who helped them during the nomination process and the election campaign. The motivation, resources and recruiting networks amongst these respondents are compared to those of candidates, and their political networks, who, despite being placed on an eligible seat during the nomination process ended up losing a seat in Parliament as a consequence of the flexible list system. The analysis shows how dissatisfaction with the nomination process creates a motivation to use the preferential voting system in order to overrule the decisions made by the party. The result also indicates that the elected candidates and their political networks are more active within voluntary associations than their opponents. Furthermore, important differences in temporal resources are shown. Elected candidates can participate in the election campaign full-time and are able to take leave of absence from their ordinary jobs, while the opposite applies for the political networks. The political networks supporting elected candidates do not work full-time within the party to the same extent as networks supporting non-elected candidates. A suggestion for future research is to examine the importance of voluntary associations in relation to the use of preferential votes in flexible list systems.

Ukraine has repeatedly shifted between the two sub-types of semi-presidentialism, i.e. between premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism. The aim of this article is to discuss to what extent theoretical arguments against premier-presidential and president-parliamentary systems are relevant for understanding the shifting directions of the Ukrainian regime. As a point of departure, I formulate three main claims from the literature: 1) "President-parliamentarism is less conducive to democratization than premier-presidentialism."; 2) "Semi-presidentialism in both its variants have built-in incitements for intra-executive conflict between the president and the prime minister."; 3) "Semi-presidentialism in general, and president-parliamentarism in particular, encourages presidentialization of political parties." I conclude from the study's empirical overview that the president-parliamentary system– the constitutional arrangement with the most dismal record of democratization – has been instrumental in strengthening presidential dominance and authoritarian tendencies. The premier-presidential period 2006–2010 was by no means smooth and stable, but the presidential dominance weakened and the survival of the government was firmly anchored in the parliament. During this period, there were also indications of a gradual strengthening of institutional capacity among the main political parties and the parliament began to emerge as a significant political arena.

This dissertation studies power and the production of the democratic subject in the context of democratic debate. It is important to understand the role of power in democratic debate. Even more important is to understand how power underpins the construction of the democratic subject in this context. Is it possible for just anybody to be a convincing democratic subject? Or does democratic debate assume a particular kind of body – a democratic "super-body"? This thesis argues that in order to answer such questions it is not sufficient to study the intellectual and verbal aspects of democratic debate. The situation needs to be examined in its material enactment. Since previous research does not offer a coherent way of analysing how power underpins the material construction of the democratic subject, this dissertation develops such an analytical perspective, which it terms a feminist theatrical perspective. The perspective is "theatrical" because it studies democratic debate as intra-active enactment, which assumes stage, costume and stage direction. The perspective is inspired by Foucault and Butler as well as by feminist performance, architectural and design research. The feminist theatrical perspective, and the methodological framework that it offers, constitutes the main contribution of the thesis. The dissertation focuses on democratic debate in the specific form of the parliamentary debate. It identifies three key parliamentary ideals about democratic debate that are materially enacted as "dramas" during the debate: the idea that democratic debate is built on equality, that it is important as representing the people, and that it is importantly rendered in combative struggle. Empirically, the thesis is based on an ethnographic field-study of the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, conducted in 2008/2009, and an in-depth study of two debates between party leaders that took place in the Riksdag in 2010. The main finding is that power is necessarily ambivalent in the production of the democratic subject in this context. The thesis identifies frameworks for how the democratic subject should move, behave, sound and look. However, these frameworks are contradictory. No actual physical body could, as a "super-body", fully correspond to the physical characteristics that are assumed about the democratic subject.

The purpose of this dissertation is to map and analyze the spatial and temporal variation in women's political representation at both the national and local level. In the dissertation it is argued that women's political representation is the outcome of the interplay between structures, institutions and actors. The perspective is a comparative one, in which quantitative analyses and more qualitative case-studies complement each other. When analysing spatial variation a mainly quantitative approach is taken, while the case-study approach is applied to the temporal variation. The first empirical chapter examines whether female representation in the lower houses of the world's parliaments co-varies with other indicators of the political situation of women in order to ensure the validity of the analysis. In the second empirical chapter female representation in parliaments of the world during the post-war period is analyzed. In the third empirical chapter the focus narrows down to women's political representation in Western Europe during the post-war period, where both the national and local level is analysed. The fourth empirical chapter consists of case studies of six countries. Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands feature high female representation; France, Greece and Ireland low female representation. In the fifth empirical chapter women's political representation at the local level in Norway and Sweden is analysed during the post-war period. In the sixth empirical chapter the temporal variation in female representation in a number of Swedish municipalities is analysed, from the introduction of female suffrage in 1921 until 2002. The result is that both structures, institutions and actors are necessary to explain the spatial and temporal variation in female representation. There is no direct link between structures and female representation. The structure does affect the actors and co-varies with the institutions, but successful actors as entrepreneurs might boost female representation. Actors are important. The increase in female representation cannot be seen as an automatic process taking care of itself. Conscious actors are necessary both to affect and to monitor the development. An unfavourable structural context might be compensated for by actors and institutions which favour female representation.

Mediatization and Power: An Analysis of the Media's Political Influence. During the last few decades it has become increasingly common to characterize modern politics as mediated and mediatized. Problematic, though, is that both concepts are referred to more often than they are properly defined, and that there is a deficit in systematic empirical studies on the degree to which politics has become mediatized. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to analyze the concepts of "mediated" and "mediatized" politics, and to empirically investigate how Swedish members of parliament and political journalists perceive the media's political influence. The theoretical analysis suggests that the mediatization of politics should be understood as a multidimensional concept, whereas the empirical results show that both members of parliament and political journalists believe that the media do have extensive influence over politics as well as the general public.

This dissertation analyses how the Government runs governmental agencies. Which management methods can and may the Government apply for the purpose of implementing political decisions through administratively independent agencies? Can political actions be conducted with rational methods? In accordance with Swedish administrative practice, Government and Parliament are to set up comprehensive objectives and establish the principal direction of activities, while the agencies are responsible for the implementation of the political decisions. The subject of the dissertation is primarily results-based reports, and results are analysed and assessed relative to the objects. The purpose of this study is to compare how management should work according to political programs and intensions, and how it actually works in Parliament, the Government and Government Office, and agencies. It is based primarily on a close scrutiny of management in eight agencies and in the Government Office, Government and Parliament. Special attention is devoted to the implementation of results-based management in Swedish administration, and also to relations between politicians and civil servants at various stages of the management process. Considerable differences between objectives and reality are found, and also considerable differences between different agencies and fields of activity. Certain parts of the results-based management model have been over-applied, due to the fact that the Government has set too many and too detailed objectives. Other parts are under-applied, and there are too few examples of systematic follow-ups and assessment of activities. Results-based management contains valuable features, primarily that results awareness is emphasized in agencies, but the Government has taken its management ambitions too far. The consequence is that necessary developments and changes in the activities of the agencies have not been implemented.

The main question in this thesis is what kind of considerations political parties in the Swedish parliament have made between individual freedoms and state power in matters concerning information technology. Hence, it relates to a central and never ending debate about the proper relationship between the individual rights of citizens and protection of their personal integrity vis-à-vis state power and the interest of society in general, and in particular how this is affected by the rapid development of information technology. Four cases of legislative processes about information technology are analyzed. These cases concern parliamentary debates regarding the secrecy act (sekretesslagen) in 1980 (first debate), three debates concerning the personal data act (personuppgiftslagen) in 1998-99, three debates concerning the surveillance and crime prevention act (lag om hemlig rumsavlyssning & åtgärder för att förhindra vissa särskilt allvarliga brott med mera) in 2006-07 and three debates concerning the national defence radio establishment act (FRA & lag om signalspaning) in 2007-09. An analytical model is developed that includes two ideal types, individual freedom and state power, for the study and categorization of the parties and their positions in each debate. Thus, parties are categorized according to their proximity to the ideal types. The study illustrates that the majority of parties have a tendency to compromise between values constituting the two ideal types; they choose a so called hybrid position in between individual freedom and state power. The exception to this pattern is the Green Party and the Left Party that tend to choose a position close to individual freedom. Three hypotheses are tested. The first implies that parties tend to position themselves in-between the ideal type positions of individual freedom and state power (hybrid positions). This hypothesis gets strong support as hybrid positions are the most common outcome. The second hypothesis infers that a party has a tendency to support ...

In the late 19th century it became possible to utilize electricity in lighting, industrial processes and for traction. To Sweden, which at that time was gradually being transformed from an overwhelmingly agrarian country into an industrialized nation, this was of great advantage because Sweden was a country well furnished with hydro-electric power, but almost completely lacking in other sources of energy. Beginning in the 1890's a number of privately-owned powerstations were built almost all over the country. During the early 20th century, the Swedish Government became increasingly involved in hydropower development. In 1906 the Government decided to make its debut as a power producer. A government bill proposing the building of a power station at Trollhättan was submitted to the Swedish Parliament, and Parliament approved this bill the same year. Two years later the State Power Board was formed, and in 19 10 Parliament approved plans to build a great power station at Porjus, on the Lule River in the north of Sweden. This power station is the main object of my study. The questions 1 shall try to give an answer to in my study are the following. Why did the State build a power station at Porjus? What happened to the industrial visions that initiated this project? On a more general level my dissertation intends to contribute to the understanding of the establishment of modem technological systems in Sweden. 1 shall try to achieve this by means of a model elaborated by Thomas P. Hughes, Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Pennsylvania. In Hughes' model technical systems are regarded as a part of a "socio-technical" or "technological" system. The core of the theory can be expressed in these words: "They are both socially constructed and society shaping." In my study, which consists of four parts, Part 1 is a study in which energy conditions in Sweden at the turn of the century are discussed in order to ascertain whether the prevailing sources of energy and power transmission methods are to be regarded as promotors of, or obstacles to a continued industrialisation. In Part 11 the following question is put in focus. Why did the State build one of its first big power stations in an area of wilderness in the north of Sweden? The answer to that question is given through a discussion in three steps. It starts with a discussion about why the Railway Board wanted to electrify the State railway. When the Railway Board made that decision they had intended to carry out the largescale trial electrification of a railway line in the western part of Sweden. In 1908 these plans were changed and the Railway Board decided to choose the Riksgräns Railway in the north of Sweden instead. The reasons for this change are discussed in a second step, and after that a discussion follows in which the choice of the Porjus Falls is explained. In Part 111 the dimensioning of the Porjussystem is discussed - i. e. the preliminary work that were needed to build the station, the power station, the transmission system and the locomotives. In the discussion problems connected with the locality of the Porjus Falls are emphasized. Part IV contains a discussion on the following theme. What happened with the industrial expectations which were once the main reason for the decision to build a power station at Porjus? ; Godkänd; 1994; 20070426 (ysko)

The municipal election of 1934 gave the Nazi party over 30 per cent of the votes in Tärendö municipality which led to six mandates in the municipal council and the chairmanship for the local Nazi politician. The Nazi party held its position as a municipal political force still until the end of Second World War with a popular vote of over 12 per cent in the election 1944 to the parliament. In comparison to other municipalities in the Swedish Tornio valley this was an exceptional political expression by the citizens. In the article we compare Tärendö toward Pajala from different perspectives of institutional, the mobilization of political movement and political leadership. The article tries to answer: how come that the Nazi party was successful in Tärendö but not in Pajala, despite the short distance and the cultural, social and market similarities between the two municipalities? The results show that institutional structure can only explain in margin the differences in Nazi voting. The main reason behind Nazi voting in Tärendö was the interaction between the mobilization of the political movements and the character of the local political leadership.

While authoritarian presidents prevail under heavily president-oriented constitutions throughout the post-Soviet region, democracy along parliamentary lines triumphs in Central Europe. This article discusses the constitutional pattern among the post-communist countries on the basis of two general questions: First, how can we explain why strong presidential constitutions dominate throughout the post-Soviet region whereas constrained presidencies and governments anchored in parliament have become the prevailing option in Central Europe? Second, and interlinked with the first question, why have so many post-communist countries (in the post-Soviet region as well as in Central Europe) chosen neither parliamentarism nor presidentialism, but instead semi-presidential arrangements whereby a directly elected president is provided with considerable powers and coexists with a prime minister? The analysis indicates that both historical-institutional and actor-oriented factors are relevant here. Key factors have been regime transition, pre-communist era constitutions and leaders, as well as short-term economic and political considerations. With differing strengths and in partly different ways, these factors seem to have affected the actors' preferences and final constitutional compromises.

Studien redovisar den tredje mätningen som följer upp förändringar av trafikanternas hastighetsval och hastighetsefterlevnad på det kommunala huvudvägnätet i tätort. Resultaten visar att de genomsnittliga reshastigheterna ligger under gällande hastighetsgräns, men att bristande hastighetsefterlevnad fortfarande är ett problem. År 2009 fattades ett riksdagsbeslut som innebar ett mål att antalet dödade i vägtrafiken skulle halveras mellan åren 2007 och 2020. En av indikatorerna för att följa utvecklingen är "hastighetsefterlevnad på det kommunala vägnätet". Ett delmål är att minst 80 procent av trafikarbetet ska ske inom gällande hastighetsgräns. År 2012 var startår för mätserien och under 2015 genomfördes den tredje uppföljande mätningen. ; In 2009 the Swedish Parliament passed a resolution stating that by 2020 the number of fatalities from road traffic crashes should be reduced to half the level in 2007. This corresponds to a maximum of 220 deaths in 2020. In order to monitor progress toward this goal, yearly national follow-up studies are conducted to examine trends in the numbers of people killed and severely injured, along with a number of indicators. One of these indicators is speed limit compliance on the municipality streets; the milestone here is to have at least 80 per cent of all traffic travelling within the speed limit. The aim of the present study is to report the changes between the years 2014 and 2015 concerning driver speed levels and speed limit compliance on the main municipality streets. The annual measurement series started in year 2012 and with the measurement series from 2015, this third follow-up was performed.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse women's political representation in the Swedish parliament 1970-2002, a period during which the share of women parliamentarians increased from 14 to 45 percent, and to assess changes in party rules and party norms in terms of regulative and discursive continuity and change. Inspired by Carol Lee Bacchi's "What's the Problem? Approach," with its focus on the construction of political problems rather than "the problem" as such, this dissertation studies how Swedish political parties have formulated the problem of women's exclusion from parliamentary politics, what causes of women's under representation they have identified and what solutions they have proposed. The dissertation also studies how party rules to increase the number of women have been implemented in the 2002 nomination process. The dissertation is based on party documents from the period 1970-2002, a national survey to all nomination committees in the parliamentary election in 2002 and 70 interviews with nomination committee members for three political parties in two electoral constituencies. The analysis shows how both party rules and party norms regarding women's political representation have changed over time. The analysis also shows that the framing of women's representation changed over time: from an optimistic view of historical development, gender equality as 'equal opportunity' and harmony between the sexes to a critical view on historical development and gender equality as 'equality of results'. The analysis of the nomination process shows that gender is still a key issue in the composition of party lists but that the number of women on party lists in some parties is dependent on women gatekeepers on the nomination committees. It also shows that the ordering of the list is highly dependent on the candidate list from the previous election and that this order of succession also covers non-winnable seats.