This book brings together life stories from five generations of Balts, living through the diverse and recurring transformations of the twentieth century: occupations, war, independence, totalitarianism, and democratic rule and market economy. The twentieth century history of the Baltic countries has often been deeply tragic. Lying on the coastline of the Baltic Sea, these rather small but strategically well located territories have historically found themselves in the middle of many power struggles between larger states, empires and other power-holders: the Teutonic Knights, Swedish kings, Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Today, they are once again forced to stand up to the Russian Federation.

Biographical interviewing is a field focused on individuals, and on how those individuals choose to re-create and present their lived lives, make meaning of it through the narratives they tell. To interpret the biographical narrations of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, shaped by complex and controversial historical background, the authors use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social and cultural capitals, the principles of Erving Goffman’s framing analysis and Alessandro Portelli’s distinction of private and public spheres, Anton Steen’s investigations of post-Socialist elites and Piotr Sztompka’s theory of cultural trauma, etc. Given analyses of particular biographical narrations are supplemented by brief historical and sociological overviews, which allow the reader to better understand the contexts of lived lives, and the mental atmosphere in which the interviews were conducted.

The aim of this study is to examine how female refugees in Sweden experience that their escape and arrival to Sweden have formed their lives and wellbeing. The study seeks to understand how several women live their lives in relation to equality, discrimination and justice within the Swedish territorial borders. This is done with the Capability Approach by Martha C Nussbaum where she uses a list of universal values that should be central to women in every country, as a method of comparing how fair women live. I chose to interview six women who have fled to Sweden as refugees during the past 10 years, in order to see if the Capability Approach applies to them. I have also used Nancy Frasers theory of the scales of justice in my thesis. Fraser mentions three-dimensional politics where the inclusion of redistribution, recognition and representation should be achieved to create justice for women. The result showed that the women lack central capabilities such as the right to not being discriminated based on their ethnicity or religion, and the right to experience emotional development that is not bothered by traumatic experiences or unhealthy relationships. Furthermore, these women do not have the right to participate in political decisions that affect and shape their lives. The result in relation to Fraser’s theory indicates that these women have a limited freedom in Sweden. According to Fraser, there has to be an integration of a redistribution of resources, recognition, and a representation in Swedish politics, which benefit female refugees.

This research seeks to answer how a consociational political model works in practice in the case of Lebanon. Through an examination of Lebanon’s political system and its power-sharing formula, the case study identifies the four pillars of consociationalism, i.e. grand coalition, minority veto, proportional representation and segmental autonomy, and studies their functionality after the Ta’if Agreement was reached in 1989. Although the agreement ended the Lebanese civil war, it did not provide much in regards to the political system. The study concludes that the four pillars are extremely weak in Lebanon and that the consociational system rather reinforces differences in the Lebanese society instead of neutralizing them.

The role of ‘fair’ institutions in developing democratic legitimacy has received increased attention. Citizens who perceive – on basis of past experiences – that they are being treated fairly by authorities have been held to have greater trust in political institutions. However, previous studies on the relationship between procedural fairness and political trust have not paid sufficient attention to individuals with limited first-hand experiences of authorities. We examine the relationship on an authority that virtually all individuals meet early in life: the school. Using structural equation modeling on unique panel data covering 1,500 Swedish adolescents (ages ranging from 13 to 17), we find a reciprocal relationship: personal encounters with school authorities shape young people’s political trust; however, the images that adolescents get of the political system (through family, peers, media, etc.) have also consequences on their perceptions about the authorities they encounter in their daily lives. The analysis increases our understanding of how individuals form their political allegiances by showing that the relationship between fairness and trust is more dynamic than has previously been suggested: neither an accumulated set of experiences of authorities nor formal ties with political institutions (as voters, etc.) are required for a relationship to emerge. 

The predicament of rational choice models in politics is seemingly the irrationality of participation in politics activity, in such, by voting. That it is irrational for most of the taxpayers to vote nor to attain education about politics. Some authors propose different approaches to understand why people vote, such as civic duty and civic voluntarism model. This essay examines language barrier and how it affects the voter turnout in Sweden. Furthermore, we observe foreign-born Swedes in Skärholmen region, and ask ourselves:

• Should language deficiency lead to lower division?

• If those with language shortages still vote, what is important to them?

The study shows that people with higher language skills also tend to vote more often than others. And for those who have a lower language skill differs within the group some votes regardless and other abstain. I intend to link my research to existing theories to confront the theories with new empirical knowledge, using a hypothetical-deductive method.

This article seeks to move beyond the Euro/North-centrism recurrent in methodological discussions on what we may learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. Such debates often centre on uncertainty and involuntary immobility – aspects which are hardly new for many researchers. In this article, we argue that the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink research relations between what we term ‘contracting researchers’ in the Global North and ‘facilitating researchers’ in the Global South. Such relations are often marked by rampant inequalities in remuneration, working conditions, and visibility/authorship. Drawing upon experiences in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, and India, we argue that the pandemic increased the dependence on – and highlighted the invaluable contributions and skills of – facilitating researchers, in part slightly refiguring bargaining power. We also propose pathways for change, arguing for a strong collaborative approach and the need for institutional change, without discarding the responsibilities of individual researchers.

Contributing to the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” essay series, Oscar Abedi, Maria Eriksson Baaz, David Mwambari, Swati Parashar, Anju Oseema Maria Toppo, and James Vincent outline various paths toward reducing field research’s potential for exploitation, especially that of Global South collaborators. The pandemic has highlighted inequalities and immobility that differently affect facilitating researchers and contracting researchers. In response, the authors identify key issues that institutions, publishers, and individual researchers must reflect on in order to counteract these imbalances—and take advantage of an opportunity to fundamentally transform field research into collaborative knowledge production.

War is gendered. The scholarship of gender and war is comprehensive and multi-layered, yet there seems to be some difficulty to keep up with the new developments in technology and its involvement in warfare. It was only until a few years ago that a new method of warfare - cyber warfare, a form of hybrid warfare, emerged and got the spotlight in the discussions on new methods of warfare. However, as the literature is growing, and international organisations are producing policy and strategy documents on cyber warfare, there seems to be a research gap on the relation between gender and cyber warfare, more specifically the gendered aspects of cyber warfare. This thesis attempts to fill that research gap and intends to answer how cyber warfare may be gendered. This is be done by generally looking at the literature of “Gender and War” and “Gender and Cyber”, and Gunneriusson and Ottis (2013) categorisation of how cyberspace is used in military operations from a hybrid warfare perspective. Gunneriusson and Otitis’s categorisation focus on inter alia cyber-attacks on non-military targets, and the use of propaganda. The overview of the research on gender and cyber focus on the workforce within cyber related sectors and gender-based violence, and the overview of research on gender and war brings up numerous examples of the nexus between gender and war.  Based on the overview of the two fields of research along with Gunneriusson and Ottis categorisation this thesis comes to the conclusion that cyber warfare can be gendered. The purpose of the examples of cyber-attacks are the same when same attacks are conducted offline and these types of attack offline have the same effect online. The difference is that an attack through the cyberspace intensifies the consequences in comparison to when these same methods were used in other domains.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka varför afrikanska landsbundna nationer är fattigareän afrikanska icke-landsbundna nationer. Adam Smith konstaterade redan 1776 i sinbok ”Nationernas välstånd” att en nations geografiska position har en betydelse för hur aktivman eventuellt kommer bli i den globala handeln. Sedan dess har forskning tagitlandsbundenhets negativa effekter alltför vedertaget. Studiens förklarande variabler är FDI,infrastruktur kvalité och export. Vidare inkluderas även kolonialhistoria, utbildning och skattsom kontrollvariabler. För att undersöka sambandet använder sig studien sig av multipelregressionsanalys genom OLS (ordinary least square) metod för att undersöka sambanden.Två av studiens hypoteser går i linje med resultat, att afrikanska landsbundna länder ärfattigare på grund av de har sämre infrastruktur och har lägre export men att effekten avlandsbundenhet kvarstod vid kontroll för FDI. Vid kontroll för nationer med liknandeinfrastruktur kvalité oavsett landsbundenhet – visar resultaten att infrastruktur kvalitén kankompensera de geografiska hindren.

Building on historical institutionalism, this paper explores gradual institutional change. As previous research on institutional change has focused on shifts towards gender equality, there is less known about gender-inequitable changes. The reversal of abortion rights in the United States by overturning Roe v. Wade (1973) demonstrates the need to study gender-inequitable changes. By being attentive to the characteristics of the U.S. government and legislative system when looking at this historical process, this paper seeks to contribute to our knowledge of how this reform of abortion rights has come about. This theoretical perspective facilitates the exploration of the institutional context by analyzing what kinds of strategies and behaviors by actors have been successful and what have failed. The actors seeking to challenge existing rules have been forced to adjust their strategies in the different phases of this process to achieve their long-term goal of reversing abortion rights. 

While the same formal candidate selection rules are generally in place throughout a state, there is often intracountry variation in male descriptive overrepresentation. To explain this variation, scholars cannot focus exclusively on women (e.g., how do women respond to formal institutional opportunities?) or femininity (e.g., how do norms governing appropriate female behavior affect women's odds of being selected as a candidate?). Rather, scholars must attend to the ways that informal norms regarding masculinity operate across space and time within a country. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, this essay examines two intracountry sources of variation in candidate selection: the spatial urban-rural divide and temporal differences between first-time recruitment and renomination. While the formal candidate selection rules are uniform, informal institutions vary depending on where and when we look, leading to different levels of male overrepresentation.

The purpose of this thesis is to test two hypotheses about how work affects political participation. The first concerns unemployment, and states that unemployment has strong and negative effects on political activity. The second hypothesis is found in theories of participatory democracy, and claims that more democratic workplaces lead to more political participation. Existing empirical evidence on both of the hypotheses is not conclusive. Furthermore, studies have mainly been carried out using data collected in the United States. Here empirical tests of the hypotheses are undertaken using a Swedish survey.

The results confirm the first hypothesis; unemployment has negative effects on political participation. The reasons for these negative effects are that the unemployed become less active in organisational life, fall outside of the recruitment networks where people are being asked to participate in politics, and experience a decrease in income. The second hypothesis is not supported. Workplace participation does not affect political participation, according to the analyses. The results are surprising for both hypotheses, and contradict previous empirical findings. The differences in results are likely due to differences in research design and differences in approaches to analysing political participation. Previous studies are inadequate in these perspectives, it is maintained.

The thesis ends with a discussion of the results from the perspective of normative democratic theory. It is argued that the lack of political equality is particularly acute when the low participation among the unemployed is considered.

Interethnic contacts are generally assumed to reduce discrimination and prejudice. According to this optimistic view – and in conflict with Allport’s well-known theory – contacts have positive effects even when they are rather distant. However, findings of recent experimental field research indirectly cast doubt on this belief. To our knowledge, this is the first field experiment thoroughly investigating close as well as more distant contacts simultaneously. In a correspondence study (n = 3015), Swedish elementary school principals were randomly contacted by fictional parents with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names asking school-related questions. The unique design also used registry data (e.g., on ethnicity). The results support Allport’s more pessimistic view: working closely with minority members of school management was associated with lower levels of ethnic discrimination regarding important qualitative aspects of the principals’ communication with the school parents, but no such pattern was observed for more distant workplace contacts with minority teachers.

Poor health is generally believed to cause political passivity. Prior studies that satisfactorily acknowledge the causality problems involved are mainly limited to considering turnout and the U.S.A., so we lack knowledge of how non-electoral participation is affected in other countries. This article considers Sweden, characterized by a generous welfare state and an extensive public health system. Using unique panel data, which allow more thorough analyses of causality, poor health was found to have a negative effect on voting but not on non-electoral participation. By primarily focusing on other countries than Sweden and the U.S.A., it is a task for future longitudinal research to show whether the belief that poor health lead to political passivity is incorrect—or whether Sweden is an exceptional case, due to the barriers to participation being particularly low there.

Several schools of thought claim that citizens can develop their democratic skills at the workplace. Here I focus on the hypothesis put forward by Carole Pateman and by Sidney Verba and colleagues that state that by practicing civic skills and democratic decision-making at the workplace, citizens become more active in politics. I test the hypothesis with a nationally representative panel survey of the Swedish population. My findings contradict previous empirical research as no impact on political participation was discovered. I argue that the effects may have been overestimated in prior studies because the tests were based on cross-sectional data: insufficient care was taken with a number of significant methodological problems. The study points to the importance of using panel models when investigating the causes of political participation.

Några av 1980-talets oftast förekommande styrningsfilosofier inom den offentliga sektorn diskuteras. I fokus står Arbetsmarknadsverket (AMV), som under 1980-talet befann sig i frontlinjen med att införa sådana förändringar. Slutsatsen är att styrningsfilo

Enligt tidigare forskning används demokrati- och jämlikhetsargument sällan när övergripande reformer på skolområdet motiveras. Det är dock okänt om detta gäller även de rödgröna oppositionspartierna, och inte bara den borgerliga regeringen. Här studeras riksdagsdebatten och propositionstexten rörande den senaste centrala gymnasiereformen från år 2009. Undersökningen visar att även oppositionen – likt den borgerliga regeringen – i liten utsträckning använder demokrati- och jämlikhetsargument. Resultaten är i linje med farhågor om att demokratiuppdraget försummas när framtidens utbildning utformas.

A common thought is that political participation must be equally high among different social groups - such as women and men or various socioeconomic groups - in order for political equality to be fulfilled. This approach has, however, been criticized for being too crude. Several scholars argue that one must also study the reasons behind group differences in participation. If these differences are explained by differences in resources - and not political motivation - political equality is threatened, as this points to structural inequalities determining participatory differences. Using this perspective, I make an empirical investigation into the political participation of women and men in Sweden, a country known for unusually far-reaching political gender equality. In spite of this, men devote more of their political activities to areas of production, such as questions relating to working life, and I find that this difference may be explained by a male advantage in political resources (civic skills, primarily). The conclusion is that political equality has not yet been fully realized between women and men in Sweden. Hence, future studies should consider separating between different policy areas, when empirically evaluating the status of political equality. Quantitative methods are used in the empirical analyses.

The article is available at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/15/schoolchildren-around-world-are-climate-strike-heres-what-you-need-know/

I rapporten testas hypotesen att arbetslöshet orsakar politisk passivitet i Sverige. Datamaterialet för undersökningen utgörs av de svenska Levnadsnivåundersökningarna, och i första hand de data som samlades in 1991. Resultaten ger föga stöd åt hypotesen.

For some time been it has been hypothesized that involvement in civic associations creates generalized social trust. Yet, prior panel data studies, based mainly on data collected in Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have found little support for the existence of such an effect. This article adds further empirical knowledge, focusing on Sweden. The evidence presented here is the first to provide support for the hypothesis using a survey that allows panel data models. In the conclusions, it is discussed whether the differing findings may depend on Sweden being a particularly favourable environment, considering its comparatively democratic and prosperous associational life; or if the reason is that the data at hand do not allow using exactly the same panel models as in some of the prior studies.

Political participation is higher among men than women in most parts of the world. However, earlier research has shown that this does not hold true in Scandinavia, including Sweden, where gender differences are remarkably small. This article studies the causes of the Swedish situation. A conventional hypothesis is formulated based on research from other parts of the world. It assumes that gender-equal participation in Sweden can be explained by the lack of gender differences in certain political resource and motivational factors that are often analyzed. However, this hypothesis is not supported by the data, which instead indicates a female disadvantage with regard to both resources and motivation. Two alternative hypotheses are developed and shown as empirically viable. The first assumes that women more often adhere to norms that emphasize the importance of being politically active, which promotes their participation in politics. The second focuses on collective mobilization based on interests specific to women. In line with this hypothesis, only women are shown to be members of women's organizations and hold more radical opinions on issues related to gender equality and reproduction. These factors have a positive impact on women's participation, and together they explain a noticeable amount of the male advantage with regard to conventional explanatory factors. Therefore they are important contributory causes of gender-equal participation in Sweden, although other factors, not discussed here, also contribute. Quantitative methods are used in the analyses, and the study material is the 1997 Swedish Citizenship Survey.

Utbildningens positiva effekter på demokrati och jämlikhet har traditionellt framhållits som viktigti Sverige. Aktuell forskning tyder dock på att reformer på skolområdet allt mindre motiveras utifrån demokrati-och jämlikhetsaspekter, medan samhällsekonomiska hänsyn ges allt större utrymme. Dessa studier är tämligen översiktliga och kompletteras här med en mer detaljerad textanalys av en av de senaste decenniernas mest genomgripande gymnasiereformer i Sverige. Den genomdrevs år 1991,av Socialdemokraterna, och innebar att praktiska program förlängdes med ett tredjeår samt försågs med betydligt fler timmar inom teoretiska ämnen. Givetden svenska socialdemokratiska traditionen skulle man kunna vänta sig en diskussionmed hänvisning främst till demokrati-och jämlikhetsvärden, speciellt då reformen beskrivits som en utpräglad jämlikhetsreform. Samhällsekonomiska tillväxtaspekter visar sig dock dominera, i linje med den internationella trend som annan forskning påvisat.

Demokrati- och jämlikhetsargument intar en alltmer marginell roll när reformer på skolområdet diskuteras. Det är dock okänt om detta även gäller vänsterblocket, och inte bara de borgerliga partierna. Här studeras debatten kring den centrala gymnasiereform som den borgerliga regeringen genomförde 2009 (”Högre krav och kvalitet i den nya gymnasieskolan”). Undersökningen visar att Socialdemokraterna och Miljöpartiet, i likhet med högerpartierna, gav liten tyngd åt demokrati- och jämlikhetsresonemang. Undantaget var Vänsterpartiet, som riktade kraftfull kritik mot reformen utifrån ett jämlikhetsperspektiv. Demokratiuppdraget sägs försummas när framtidens utbildning utformas, en farhåga som stöds av resultaten i den här studien.