| 1. |
- Ullström, Anna, 1978-
(författare)
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Styrning bakom kulisserna : Regeringskansliets politiska staber och regeringens styrningskapacitet
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis analyses one of the less explored areas of Swedish politics: the political appointees in the ministerial staffs of the Swedish core executive. The study draws attention to the everyday life of the ministerial staff in order to give an idea of their function: What do the political appointees do? How is the work of the ministerial staffs organized? How is policy coordinated at the political level? The main empirical focus of this thesis is the 2002-2006 term of office. The study contributes to an understanding of the role of political advisers in steering and policy making, and, in the light of this, their potential influence on the policy capacity of the government is considered. Political advisers occupy an ambiguous place within the political system. They play a vital political role, but their presence also challenges the traditional relationship between ministers and public servants. The study shows that political advisers certainly have a leeway to participate in the steering of the ministry's civil servants: they can be said to have a number of steering functions. At the same time, it is made clear that this does not mean that the political advisers are in the position to influence government policy to any great extent. In conclusion, it is suggested that the ministerial staffs do have importance for the government's policy capacity in the sense that they reduce the work load of both the minister and the state secretary and thereby make space for them to govern. The research questions are answered by means of empirical material gathered through a combination of methods, providing data with a range as well as depth and context rarely found in studies of core executives: a survey, participatory observations, focus groups and a series of interviews. The dissertation demonstrates that the ethnographic method is a useful tool for anyone who seeks to highlight and explain the relationships within political organizations.
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| 2. |
- Lindberg, Helen, 1970-
(författare)
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Only women bleed? : a critical reassessment of comprehensive feminist social theory
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Is there a viable specifically feminist social theory that can serve as heuristic devise in our social research? This thesis is a critical reassessment of the ontological and normative assumptions of four social theories with specific and clear claims of being feminist. These are Catharine M MackInnon’s Radical Feminism, Anna G Jonasdottir’s Theory of Love Power, Luce Irigaray’s Feminism of Sexual Difference and Judith Butler’s Queer Feminism. The feminist social theories are examined and critically discussed according to their internal coherence and their external relevance; which includes the normative political implications that can be inferred. The thesis claims that implicit in every comprehensive feminist approach, there is also a specific view of science. Then follows a meta-inquiry of comprehensive feminisms as social science and as social theories, including a discussion of the effects of comprehensive ideology on social science research in general, and of the relationship between ideology, theory and a scientific approach in particular. The thesis concludes that it is highly problematic to do science feministly, but that we do need the critical questions feminists raise in order to reevaluate concepts, theories and research priorities. It is argued that feminist social theories are perhaps most helpful as ideological guidance for political action.
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| 3. |
- Duvold, Kjetil, 1971-
(författare)
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Making sense of Baltic democracy : public support and political representation in nationalising states
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A chief topic of this book is the advance of democracy in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The three countries belong to the most ‘successful’ cases of transition from communist rule to democracy, demonstrated by the fact that they joined the European Union in 2004. In contrast to other new EU members, the Baltic countries were constituents of the Soviet Union and, thus, had to embark upon state- and nation-building in tandem with democratisation and marketisation. Estonia and Latvia (but to a smaller extent Lithuania) were left with considerable numbers of immigrants from the Soviet period, which prompted the authorities to impose fairly restrictive citizenship laws. One in five Estonian and Latvian remain excluded even after 15 years of independence. This situation has created a great deal of tension, but at least thus far, no political meltdown. The case for imposing strict citizenship requirements centred on the fact that the countries were forced into the Soviet Union, but it was clearly also related to nation-building and fear of Russian influence in determining the path from communist rule. Arguably, democratisation and nation-building are based on different, sometimes even conflicting, logics. Thus, a key question in this book is to what extent – and how – diverging understanding of the political community affects democratic legitimacy. Another central task is to determine the strength of the ties between Baltic citizens and the respective political systems – in terms of support for the regimes and the degree of representation of societal interests through political parties. Applying the New Baltic Barometer 1993-2004, the book explores levels of political support among native Baltic citizens and the Russian-speaking minority groups. It reveals that democracy as an ideal enjoys increasing support, but that many Baltic citizens remain unconvinced about the performance of democracy. Corruption and the rule of law are particularly thorny issues in Latvia and Lithuania, while political parties and MPs are widely held in contempt in all three countries. The Russian-speakers appear somewhat more reluctant to embrace the current system, expressing greater enthusiasm for the Soviet system of the past. Yet another section explores the nature of political representation and the expression of demands and interests from below, offering a comprehensive examination of the Baltic party systems, including types of parties, issue dimensions, public attitudes to distributional questions, and to what extent parties channel or mirror social interests. An underlying theme is the extent to which the party systems are based on some degree of cleavage structures, or if questions of identity and nationality eclipse social interests or, alternatively, if Baltic politics at heart is driven by strong personalities rather than interest politics. Finally, the book presents the case for a specific pattern of ‘Baltic democracy’, marked by divided political communities, ambiguous mass-elite relations, and weak political representation. Conceivably, many Baltic citizens would prefer reduced political competition and stronger, more assertive leaders. Moreover, the strong emphasis on nation-building turns the Baltic countries into a potential playground for identity politics. For the time being, at least, this makes the ideological space open-ended and malleable, leaving fertile ground for fleeting populism.
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| 4. |
- Fridolfsson, Charlotte, 1972-
(författare)
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Deconstructing political protest
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Part I of the thesis Deconstructing Political Protest is an introduction to the theoretical, epistemological and (anti)ontological approach guiding the analysis in the articles comprising Part II. Investigations into the ideological organisation of political protests are the focus in all four articles. The questions asked concern what makes some subjects or political gestures tolerable and legitimate and others less so. Answering this type of questions involves deconstructing the political processes where the modes and subjects of protest are conditioned. The ideological organisation of protest is here identified as a result of power struggles. Ideology is here a closure of the social, i.e. the non-acknowledgement of the instability of how our world is organised. The four articles accordingly investigate the openings and aporias in discourses on political protest, and the struggle between hegemony and its unmaking, rather than search for a hermeneutic whole. An occupation, a demonstration and a referendum serve as examples when deconstructing discourses organising political protests. What these three events have in common is how the “laws” regulating political protests are broken, yet it is exactly when the laws are broken that they appear as an independent structure. The illegal occupation is additionally breaking the law regulating political protest by appearing innocous in the hegemonic discourse. Activists occupying an operation ward are in this example not condemned as criminals but are instead respected as an anomaly deviating from regular problematic occupants. Similarly street demonstrations in the second example relate to a violent outside deviating from the normal peaceful demonstration, but in this example the outside violence blends into the identity of all activist through various metaphors. The third example examines how a referendum, formally a well-respected mode of protest, can still be questioned in a hegemonic discourse. The events studied challenge the notion of what constitutes reasonable political activity, but simultaneously maintain the meaning of, and become the condition of possibility for, the acceptable and unacceptable political protest since the laws regulationg political protest are determined by their transgressions.
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| 5. |
- Lennqvist-Lindén, Ann-Sofie
(författare)
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Att lägga politiken tillrätta : kommunala chefers professionalisering
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The desire for many people today is to be professional, and many occupations seek professional status. The idea of a profession has a higher status than a mere occupation; professionals have lot of knowledge and power to decide about their own work and they can also voice opinions about others. Occupations are driven towards attaining professional status. This process is not driven by single individuals aiming to exercise power in relation to other individuals. It is a collective, national process by an occupation. The overall aim of this dissertation is to examine, describe and analyze the process of professionalization of local public managers. There are four researchtopics: a) What are the characteristics of a professional group, and do these apply to local public managers? b) How is municipal organization portrayed with regard to the roles of politicians and administrators? c) How do politicians,managers, and public servants view themselves and each other in a normative and descriptive way? d) In what ways are managers trying to increase their influence to reach a position from which it is possible to choose to follow, or notfollow, a political decision? The methods used in this research are several; a deep case study in which surveys, observations, document studies and interviews are conducted. As theoretical framework theories of power, professionalization and discourse are used to analyze the empirical material from the case study.The results show top managers’ ongoing quest for professional status. They exclude other groups in order to handle their work without interference from others – discretion, the driving force behind professionalization. Usurpation is a strategy to get into the area of the politicians. Politicians are talked of as children in need for raise and a municipality is perceived as a private business enterprise. In this discourse values such as effectiveness, customer satisfaction, competition and value-for-money are important. The municipality is heavily inspired by thei deas of New Public Management. This development is quite problematic withregard to democracy. The democratic values such as public ethics, political democracyand the rule of law – the public ethos - are not spoken of. My hope is that this dissertation can prompt managers to reflect, since I have tried to see their work from a different perspective than what they most probably use.
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| 6. |
- Matz, Johan
(författare)
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Constructing a Post-Soviet International Political Reality : Russian Foreign Policy Towards the Newly Independent States 1990-95
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The liberal ideas of New Political Thinking, introduced as the governing paradigm of Soviet foreign policy by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980's, were to a substantial extent "adopted" and applied by the new leadership of post-Soviet Russia, not only in its dealings with the Western world, but also when formulating a foreign policy towards the 14 Newly Independent States. However, by mid-1992, a mere six months after the Soviet collapse, there were clear indications that a dramatic change in Russian foreign policy towards its next-door neighbours had come about. A Realist vision of world politics had replaced Liberalism and Russia declared the entire post-Soviet territory to be its sphere of vital interests. Using Graham T. Allison's Governmental Politics Model and Walter Carlsnaes' Model for explaining foreign policy change, this dissertation analyses the process by which the Russian leadership, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, constructed a language of foreign policy for dealing with the international politics of the post-Soviet sphere. In order to account for the conditions, under which this process took place, Allison's model is complemented by the Copenhagen School's theory of securitisation. The dissertation concludes that Russian President Boris Yeltsin's and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev's initial unwillingness and inability to grasp the full extent of the Soviet break-up led to their adopting certain discursive elements, which served to soften the trauma of the new setting, rather than coming to terms with it. Consequently, the Russian leadership was ill equipped to handle the catalogue of complex problems emerging in the post-Soviet sphere. The presence of a discursive arena of a certain type, (defining Russia as a particular sort of actor in world politics), combined with the emergence of local, next-door problems, implied that securitising actors such as Sergei Stankevich and Evgenii Ambartsumov, were given the opportunity to stage "security speech acts", which helped them "set the agenda" and wield power and influence in the bargaining games over the formulation a Russian language of foreign policy.
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| 7. |
- Brundin, Pia, 1974-
(författare)
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Politics on the net : NGO practices and experiences
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates how different kinds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), operating in different national political contexts, perceive and use the Internet as a political space. The political space concept, as defined here, encompasses two dimensions of Internet use: one external, where organisations use the Internet for online activism and campaigning, and one internal, signifying organisational use of the Internet to promote engagement and interactivity with members and/or supporters. Another question raised is whether Internet use for political purposes by NGOs varies between different national political contexts. Moreover, do the organisations believe that the Internet has affected their political influence to any extent? The empirical data consist of the results of two surveys, one directed primarily to American NGOs, the other explicitly comparative, analysing NGOs in Sweden and the USA. Furthermore, content analyses of NGO websites have been conducted and additive indexes constructed. The findings of the study suggest that, overall, the Internet is most important to the studied organisations as a space for external political initiatives. There were, however, important differences in this regard, which could be related to the organisations’ national political contexts. For example, the American NGOs have oriented their websites primarily towards relatively superficial forms of member involvement, while the Swedish NGOs provided more interactive grassroots features on their websites. Regarding political influence, the Internet arguably has the potential to make the most dramatic difference by reinforcing the organisations’ offline political activities. The present results indicate that, despite the possible converging effect of the Internet on NGO political activism, national political culture exerts an inescapable influence on how the Internet is used as a political space by the studied organisations.
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| 8. |
- Hasic, Tigran, 1969-
(författare)
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Reconstruction planning in post-conflict zones : Bosnia and Herzegovina and the international community
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The history of mankind has been plagued by an almost continuous chain of various armed conflicts - local, regional, national and global - that have caused horrendous damage to the social and physical fabric of cities. The tragedy of millions deprived by war still continues. This study sets out to understand the nature of reconstruction after war in the light of recent armed conflicts. It attempts to catalogue and discuss the tasks involved in the process of reconstruction planning by establishing a conceptual framework of the main issues in the reconstruction process. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is examined in detail and on the whole acts as the leit-motif of the whole dissertation and positions reconstruction in the broader context of sustainable development. The study is organized into two parts that constitute the doctoral aggregate dissertation – a combining of papers with an introductory monograph. In this case the introductory monograph is an extended one and there are six papers that follow. Both sections can be read on their own merits but also constitute one entity.The rebuilding of war-devastated countries and communities can be seen as a series of nonintegrated activities carried out (and often imposed) by international agencies and governments, serving political and other agendas. The result is that calamities of war are often accompanied by the calamities of reconstruction without any regard to sustainable development. The body of knowledge related to post-conflict reconstruction lacks a strong and cohesive theory. In order to better understand the process of reconstruction we present a qualitative inquiry based on the Grounded Theory Method developed originally by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967). This approach utilizes a complex conceptualization with empirical evidence to produce theoretical structure. The results of process have evolved into the development of a conceptual model, called SCOPE (Sustainable Communities in Post-conflict Environments).This study proposes both a structure within which to examine post-conflict reconstruction and provides an implementation method. We propose to use the SCOPE model as a set of strategy, policy and program recommendations to assist the international community and all relevant decision-makers to ensure that the destruction and carnage of war does not have to be followed by a disaster of post-conflict reconstruction. We also offer to provide a new foundation and paradigm on post-conflict reconstruction, which incorporates and integrates a number of approaches into a multidisciplinary and systems thinking manner in order to better understand the complexity and dependencies of issues at hand. We believe that such a systems approach could better be able to incorporate the complexities involved and would offer much better results than the approaches currently in use.The final section of this study returns to the fact that although it is probably impossible to produce universal answers, we desperately need to find commonalities amongst different postconflict reconstruction settings in order to better deal with the reconstruction planning in a more dynamic, proactive, and sustainable manner.
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| 9. |
- Nilsson, Rangnar, 1974
(författare)
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God vetenskap. Hur forskares vetenskapsuppfattningar uttryckta i sakkunnigutlåtanden förändras i tre skilda discipliner.
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rangnar Nilsson: Good science: How researchers’ conceptions of science expressed in peer review documents change in three different disciplines (God vetenskap: Hur forskares vetenskapsuppfattningar uttryckta i sakkunnigutlåtanden förändras i tre skilda discipliner). Ph.D. Dissertation in Swedish, with a summary in English. Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg, 2009. ISBN: 978-91-7346-638-7. This dissertation examines the variety in perceptions of science and research in the academic communities of political science, literature studies and physics in Sweden 1950-1995 as expressed in expert evaluations of professorship candidates. The study relates commonalities as well as differences in these perceptions to internal conditions of the research field, and to the extramural settings and conditions of Swedish academia. Research is thus considered as a historically situated, socially entangled and contingent societal activity that produces knowledge in close concurrence with the surrounding society. The analysis of quality assessments for each discipline examines which of the following aspects of the works reviewed by expert panels are focused in their evaluation reports: problem, method, theory, object, results, writing, the totality of the work or the researcher him- or herself. Based on the panelists’ treatment of these aspects the thesis highlights the concomitant internal perceptions of science and research in each case. It is found that early on in expert evaluations, political science tends to be depicted as a research field largely focused on the research methods. The methods frequently define areas of research, and credibility is typically attained through proper use of reliable methods. Towards the end of the 1900s, political scientists took a new interest in theory, while the knowledge produced was described in less definitive or absolute words. Expert panels reviewing literature studies were traditionally more inclined to focus on the object of research or its material, whereas the methods used were rarely diagnosed. With time, however, one finds a theoretical turn, in as much as theory gained a new appreciation in this discipline as well, and it is, moreover, clearly considered as an active ingredient in knowledge production in the 1990s. As in political science, the descriptions of results - as depicted in evaluations - change from rather final pronouncements to ones that are more tentative. Such a trend may also be seen in the physicists’ evaluations. In that case evaluation reports largely home in on the results in general, but they also - when actual results are described - make explicit references to linkages with external actors or industry. The respective differences identified are analyzed as products of the history of each discipline, inherent requirements and differential relationships to the society outside of the academia.
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| 10. |
- Bonander, Fredrik, 1973-
(författare)
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Party membership and state subsidies : a comparative study
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis tests the hypothesis that increasing state subsidies to political parties cause a declined party membership. The theory that predicted this development was constructed by Epstein in 1967 and presented in his book Political Parties in Western Democracies. The theoretical propositions have been debated by political scientists since then, but no thorough test has been conducted. In order to test the hypothesis state subsidies data and party membership data was collected for the national parties from eight states. The data was then analysed by use of the panel data models. Panel data models make use of the regression analysis technique. Examples of specialized such models are analysis through the fundamental parameter of change, first differencing and pooled analysis. The results provided by the models proved to not give a straight answer. Instead, the results pointed in different directions. The most likely interpretation of the results is that increasing state subsidies to political parties does not cause a decline in party membership. To validate such a result would require that most of the results pointed in the same direction. Thus, the hypothesis of the investigation should be considered falsified. Instead the focus of future studies should probably be directed at the supply side of party membership. When party membership decline is explained by the supply side this means that the decline is explained by people stop having motive to become party members. However, it is important to remember that other interpretations of the results are possible as well.
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