The 2014 Swedish election will result in a change of government, but not in a substantive change of policy

The Social Democrats have traditionally dominated politics in Sweden. However, since 2006 a major shift occurred in the Swedish party system which culminated in a centre-right alliance led by the Moderate Party coming to power. Niklas Bolin writes that while the centre-right alliance won an unprecedented second term in the 2010 parliamentary elections, their chances of repeating this success in the 2014 elections in September look remote, with two of the alliance’s members currently sitting below the four per cent electoral threshold in the polls. He notes however that even if a change of government occurs it is unlikely to lead to substantive policy change due to a strong policy consensus between the country’s mainstream parties

Selecting party leaders: who chooses and who shapes the choice?

Political parties across Europe have a wide variety of procedures for selecting their leaders. While some hold formal leadership contests with all members casting a vote for their preferred choice, other parties can end up with a single candidate being presented to the party following negotiations behind closed doors. Nicholas Aylott and Niklas Bolin outline a model for understanding how these decisions are made by focusing on the role of so called ‘steering agents’ who help to determine which candidates are able to successfully navigate the selection process

Shifting perceptions of intra-party democracy: Leader selection in the Swedish Liberal Party

The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable consequences for the party and for Swedish politics. Moreover, the selection involved the breakdown of a long-established procedure for leader selection in the party. We seek to explain this deviant case. We emphasise an unexpected cascade of decisions by regional party branches to hold membership ballots on the leadership candidates. This event, we argue, was critical for the outcome. We also suggest a causal mechanism, a shifting perception of procedural legitimacy, that facilitated the outcome—a mechanism that could be useful in understanding leader selection and moments of party change more generally

How the rise of the Swedish radical right changed the most stable party system in Europe

The Swedish party system has long been regarded as one of the most stable in Western Europe. However, as Nicholas Aylott and Niklas Bolin write, the growth in support for the radical right Sweden Democrats ahead of the Swedish general election on 9 September represents a major challenge to the country's two traditional political blocs. While the SD may not end up in government any time soon, it will be increasingly difficult in the long-term for the mainstream parties to maintain their ‘cordon sanitaire’ around the party

Läroprocesser i nätverksstyrning

Idag finns en allt större önskan om att samhällsutvecklingen ska präglas av ständigt höjda krav på hållbarhet. Samtidigt drivs denna utveckling i allt större utsträckning i projektform, där ett projekt är separerat från det andra. Förhållandet dessa två aspekter emellan skapar en fragmenterad syn på utveckling och nya tankar att försöka förena dem blir allt tydligare. Det är ur detta som tanken kring nätverksstyrning som ny styrform har uppstått. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka om nätverksstyrda projekt leder till bättre förutsättningar för ett ökat lärande och samarbete mellan olika aktörer. Det projekt som varit studiens fallstudieobjekt heter GAIA, ett projekt som under tre år fokuserar på samverkan för att hitta nya modeller och metoder för att nå fler målgrupper och få dem att agera i en mer hållbar riktning. Vi vill genom deltagande observation undersöka vilka parametrar som påverkar det initiala skedet av lärandeprocessen och varför. Genom vår analysmodell har vi kommit fram till att GAIA på flera punkter lyckats med att 1) föra samman aktörer från olika bakgrunder, 2) utvecklat ett lärande dem emellan samt 3) en vidare förståelse och tillit till varandra. Dessa aspekter anser vi utgöra tre av de parametrar som påverkar det initiala skedet av lärandeprocessen. Vi vill genom denna uppsats hävda att GAIA består av nätverksstyrning som skapar förutsättningar för ett ökat och bättre lärande som i sin tur bidrar till en mer hållbar utveckling. Utan detta styrsätt skulle inte ett gemensamt lärande uppstå mellan aktörerna. De enskilda organisationerna hade inte sammantaget kunnat bidra med den totala mängd information, resurser och kunskap som finns att tillgå i ett nätverk. Grundtanken med samverkan är att flera aktörer som strävar efter liknande mål tillsammans kan uppnå en mer hållbar utveckling än vad de hade kunnat göra individuellt.Currently there is a growing desire for community development to be characterised by ever-increasing requirements on sustainability. Meanwhile, the societal development is increasingly conducted in the form of projects, where each project is separate from the other. The relationship between these two, somewhat contradictory aspects, creates a fragmented view on development and new ideas to try to join the two are getting more expressed. Due to this the idea of network governance as a new form of managing has emerged. The purpose of this thesis is to examine if network-driven projects lead to better conditions for increased learning and cooperation between different actors. The case study project of this thesis is called GAIA, a project which during three years focuses on collaboration to find new models and methods to reach a broader target group and get them to act in a more sustainable way. Through a participant observation we want to study the parameters that affect the initial phase of the learning process. Through our analytical tool, we have concluded that GAIA in several aspects managed to 1) bring together stakeholders from different backgrounds, 2) develop a wider learning between them, and 3) build a broader understanding and trust in each other. These three aspects we consider to be the main parameters affecting the initial phase of the learning process. We argue that GAIA consists of network governance that creates conditions for increased and better learning, which in turn contributes to a more sustainable development. Without this way of governing a shared and mutual learning would not occur between the actors. Separately the organisations could not collectively contribute to the total amount of information, resources and knowledge available in a network. The basic idea of governance is that multiple actors which pursue similar goals, together can achieve more sustainable development than what they could have done individually

New characterization measures of pore shape and connectivity applied to coatings used for controlled drug release

Pore geometry characterization-methods are important tools for understanding how pore structure influences properties such as transport through a porous material. Bottlenecks can have a large influence on transport and related properties. However, existing methods only catch certain types of bottleneck effects caused by variations in pore size. We here introduce a new measure, geodesic channel strength, which captures a different type of bottleneck effect caused by many paths coinciding in the same pore. We further develop new variants of pore size measures and propose a new way of visualizing 3-D characterization results using layered images. The new measures together with existing measures were used to characterize and visualize properties of 3-D FIB-SEM images of three leached ethyl-cellulose/hydroxypropyl-cellulose films. All films were shown to be anisotropic, and the strongest anisotropy was found in the film with lowest porosity. This film had very tortuous paths and strong geodesic channel-bottlenecks, while the paths through the other two films were relatively straight with well-connected pore networks. The geodesic channel strength was shown to give important new visual and quantitative insights about connectivity, and the new pore size measures provided useful information about anisotropies and inhomogeneities in the pore structures. The methods have been implemented in the freely available software MIST

Identity, Empathy and Argument: Immigrants in Culture and Entertainment Journalism in the Scandinavian Press

Cultural and entertainment journalism deals with aesthetic experiences, advice on cultural consumption, as well as reflection and debate on ethical and moral humanistic issues. Does this sub-field of journalism systematically represent immigrants and integration differently than the other news and commentary articles? Comparing immigration discourse in a representative sample of six Scandinavian newspapers between 1970 and 2016 using content analysis we find that cultural journalism, while clearly reverbing with the dominant national issues at the time, did provide alternative perspectives. It not only brought up themes like racism, multiculturalism, national identity and religion more often, but was also more positive, more gender-balanced and more often gave a voice to immigrants than other news did. A closer qualitative reading further suggests a typology of ten main story-types, varying relatively little over time and across national borders. Cultural journalism in this case illustrates how the cultural public sphere can positively contribute to the debate of complicated issues in the public sphere by offering resources for identification, empathy and arguments for specific points of view.publishedVersio

Making the Breakthrough : An Agency-Centred Perspective on New Party Entrance into National Parliaments

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