Purpose and Questions: There seem to exist diametrically different views regarding Rwanda’s political sphere, whether the country has made any progress at all since the 90s, and if they have been successful in establishing democracy or not. A field study was therefore carried out, plus additional research to get a more comprehensive view of the political sphere of Rwanda. The purpose of the field study was to experience and analyse the political ambiance and developments by personal experience and interview people on the ground, rather then just rely on books, media and other academics, in order to clarify if the country is progressing or not. These questions guided my research: Has Rwanda been successful in establishing democracy, in terms of fulfilling the criteria’s that constitutes “polyarchy”? - What are the democracy attitudes of the citizens? Has Rwanda made any progress at all the last decade (not just politically, but socio- economically as well), in other words is the country undergoing a modernization process? Method: This research took its first step in a minor field study (MFS), conducted in Rwanda in the summer of 2010, and later as field research again in February/ March of 2011. In order to fulfil the purpose this research undertook both qualitative and quantitative methods, in a two-part analysis, in which there are a total of one qualitative part and two more quantitative parts. Results and Conclusion: The analysis shows that Rwanda is progressing, not just politically, but socio-economically as well. The qualitative part shows that some political and civic rights seem to be curtailed, but it is important to remember the legacy of a genocide. The survey however shows that over half of the respondents believe (to some extent) that democratic principles are being respected, and that there exist political pluralism and political space in Rwanda. The genocaidaires could come back to power through democratic practices, therefore it is important that things develop carefully and that a strong leadership rules the country. The government has really managed to bring Rwanda back up on its feet and the country is clearly progressing. Rwanda can serve as a model for other countries to follow. Despite the war and ethnic diversity Rwanda has come a long way. The country seem to have established some form of democratic principles, not the same as we have in the West off course, but maybe they can’t and shouldn’t follow the models of the West since they have their own special context they have to live up to.

A travers l’étude de l’émergence et de l’évolution de l’espace de la recherche non étatique en sciences sociales en Biélorussie la thèse revisite la frontière entre la science et la politique et aborde la question de l’engagement intellectuel dans le contexte des transformations postsoviétiques. En 1992, en s’inspirant du modèle des think tanks, des entrepreneurs intellectuels biélorusses ont fondé les premières organisations privées de recherche. Le nouveau mode professionnalisé de production intellectuelle est alors conçu comme un instrument de la « désoviétisation » de la science et de la « démocratisation » de la politique. Les transformations autoritaires de 1995-1996 ont marginalisé cet espace au sein du champ du pouvoir et ont provoqué sa politisation contestataire. Vers 2006 la quasi-totalité des centres fonctionnaient en dehors des cadres légaux. La nouvelle génération de chercheurs qui arrive dans les années 2000 contribue à la reproduction de son caractère à la fois engagé et professionnel. Un nouveau système de relations entre les agents du champ politique et les think tankers permet à ces derniers de prétendre aux rôles d’« experts indépendants » et d’« intellectuels engagés ». / Studying the evolution of the space of non-state social science research in Belarus, this thesis re-examines the border between science and politics, and raises the question of political role of intellectuals in post-soviet societies. In 1992, inspired by the think tank model, the Belarusian intellectual entrepreneurs set up the first national private research institutes. The new professional mode of intellectual production was presented as a tool for “de-sovietisation” of science and “democratisation” of politics. The 1995-1996 authoritarian transformation marginalised the non-state research in the field of power. In 2006, most private research institutes lose legal status and operate informally. Nonetheless, the new generation of think tankers reproduce the professional and protest character of the non-state research. In the new relations system that connects them with agents of the political field, the think tankers continue to claim the roles of “independent experts” and “public intellectuals”.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between elections and authoritarian rule with a focus on the case of China's adoption of elections at the grassroots level. In this dissertation, I look at the incentives facing Chinese local governments in choosing between holding competitive elections or state-controlled elections, and how the selection of electoral rules shapes the public's preferences over political institutions and influences the citizens' political behaviors, especially voting in elections and participation in contentious activities. The overarching theme in this dissertation proposes that the sources and consequences of Chinese local elections are conditioned on the state-owned resources and the governing costs. When the amount of state-owned resources to rule the local society is limited, the paucity of resources will incentivize authoritarian governments to liberalize grassroots elections to offset the governance costs. The various levels of election liberalization will lead to different consequences in the public's political behavior. An abundance of state-owned resources not only discourages rulers from sharing power with the local society, but also supplies the rulers with strong capacity to obtain loyalty from voters when elections are adopted. As a result, elections under authoritarian governments with an abundance of state-owned resources will see more loyalist voters than elections with authoritarian governments with fewer state-owned resources. In addition, the varieties of election practices will exert impacts on public opinion toward the authoritarian government: awareness of elections will enhance public trust in the government and decrease the public's intention to challenge the incumbents' authority while at the same time increasing the public's faith in the institutions, thereby encouraging the public to adopt official channels to air their grievances. The analysis of the village-level as well as individual-level survey data and cases lends empirical supports to the argument. First, I find that the governing costs—measured by the size of labor force—are significantly and positively associated with the likelihood that local officials allow the villagers to freely nominate candidates. Second, I find that party members are more likely to vote in rural elections than urban elections while urban elections attract citizens with higher levels of democratic consciousness. The rural-urban divide in voter type indicates that the possession of economic resources by rural grassroots governments helps mobilize rural loyalist voters to participate in village committee elections, whereas the lack of such resources by urban governments discourages regime loyalist but encourage democratic voters to turn out to vote in urban elections. Third, I find significant evidence that citizens who are aware of grassroots elections are less likely to engage in contentious activities such as protest, strikes or demonstrations. Yet, the awareness of elections also encourages citizens to more frequently adopt, shangfang (petition), a government-sponsored conflict resolution mechanism, than those who are not aware of such elections. The implications of these findings suggest that the capability of state in controlling resources is vital to the success or failure of elections in stabilizing authoritarian regimes. The findings also provide an assessment on the substantial influence of the rural and urban grassroots elections in China's subnational democratization.

Social media are often referred to as democracy drivers in autocratic states, whereas in some countries, they appear as tools of the regimes that employ a wide range of mechanisms to restrict freedom of expression online. In authoritarian countries, political bloggers stand out as new political leaders or anti-regime actors, serve as alternative information sources, advocate for political action, or mobilize financial support for different initiatives. Political conditions in countries with established governments’ control practices complicate publishing routines for political bloggers and may increase incentives to self-censor. Employing the theory of the spiral of silence, this study analyzes self-censorship in social media among political bloggers in two neighboring post-Soviet autocratic countries - Belarus and Russia. The research is based on a comparison of media legislation in Belarus and Russia, textual analysis of political blogs, and survey among political bloggers in the two countries. The survey demonstrates that political bloggers face obstacles in forms of administrative or criminal sentences, forceful blocking of their pages, online threats, or experience pressure/ attention from secret services. Despite these challenges, political bloggers in Belarus and Russia demonstrate readiness to speak out and criticize political elites. According to the model suggested in this thesis, the majority of political bloggers practice self-censorship at the pre-publishing stages in forms of selecting topics and wording, avoiding particular names. The author argues that in autocratic countries, the spiral of silence, that engages more people to silence their opinion due to political obstacles, can be and is currently challenged by political bloggers, as decentralized political opinion leaders, who aim to break down the spiral of silence. The research contributes to media studies of social media and freedom of expression in autocratic countries. Political bloggers as neither ordinary social media users nor media in the non-democratic world require more attention among media and political scholars.

While there are numerous examples of research investigating who would protest and why, the research fields of social movements and political participation have not done enough to understand the motivations of women in protest. Nor are there enough studies of the mobilisation of women in anti-regime protest in a post-communist context. This thesis investigates what motivates women in non-democratic settings to participate in protest, despite the elevated costs and risks given the context. It examines Belarus, a protest movement where women have taken on a prevalent role in the protest movement of 2020. The research design is a within-case study using the method of in-depth interviews. I conduct interviews with ten Belarusian female protesters who are found primarily via a snowball sampling technique. The transcribed interviews are analysed using a framework of collective and selective incentives. The study finds that discontent with the government and belief in the movement’s success are significant motivations, while there is not belief that their own participation will enhance the likelihood of success. Results also show that respondents were motivated by the violence used against protesters, a newfound sense of community between Belarusians, solidarity with protesters, the peaceful repertoires in the movement and group belongingness with other women. Taken together, these results deepen our understanding of protests as motivations in themselves and of motivation as a resource, but foremost of why women protest. The results might incentivise more research to be made on women’s role in protest and motivations to join social movements.

Diploma thesis, titled " Comparison of theory and practice of authoritarian regimes in cases of Austria and Portugal between the world wars" deals with authoritarian Austria in 1934 - 1938 and authoritarian Portugal in 1926 - 1940. Diploma thesis is focused on theory of authoritarian regimes, also aimed at ideological base and authoritarian tendencies in both cases, trying to approximate Austrian and Portuguese authoritarian model. The most important part is focused on juxtaposition of theoretic concepts and their practice usage, confrontation of establishing authoritarian regimes in Austria and Portugal, also comparing regimes structures. Foreign policy connotations, which have influenced both regimes is also mentioned.

Covid-19 pandemin har påverkat hela samhället på olika sätt. Vård-och omsorgsbranschen är en bransch som har drabbats hårt då det har lett till stora påfrestningar inom äldreomsorgen, vilket i sin tur har lett till omställningar i arbetssätt. Detta har resulterat i ökade krav på bland annat enhetschefer och medarbetare som verkar inom denna bransch. Studiens huvudsakliga syfte är att undersöka hur enhetschefer inom vård- och omsorgsorganisationer anpassar sitt ledarskap under en kris. För att besvara studiens syfte har det formulerats en forskningsfråga som berör hur enhetschefer har anpassat sitt ledarskap under coronakrisen.Denna uppsats vill undersöka ledarnas uppfattningar och egna berättelser av hur deras ledarskap har anpassats under krisen. Därmed utgår studien ifrån ett kvalitativt tillvägagångssätt där data har samlats in genom att utföra semistrukturerade intervjuer med sju enhetschefer som arbetar inom vård- och omsorgsbranschen. Studien är baserad på teorier och litteratur som handlar om ledarskap inom vård- och omsorgsbranschen, hur ledarskap anpassar sig till olika situationer samt ledarskap i kris. Därtill har studien utgått ifrån två huvudsakliga ledarstilar vilka är det demokratiska och auktoritära ledarskapet. Resultatet av studien visar att ledarskapet inom vård- och omsorgsbranschen präglas av en demokratisk ledarstil men att ledarskapet anpassades under coronakrisen till en mer auktoritär ledarstil. Studien är skriven på svenska. / It is without question that the covid-19 has brought about one of the most unprecedented healthcare crises of our time. The healthcare industry is an industry that has been greatly affected as it has led to great strains in elderly care, which has led to changes in working methods. This has resulted in a rise in demand for unit managers and workers in this sector, among other things. The study's primary goal is to determine whether and how unit managers within healthcare organizations adapt their leadership during a crisis, such as the covid-19 pandemic. In order to address the study's intent, a research question has been formulated that focuses on how unit managers have adapted their leadership during the corona crisis. This essay seeks to examine the leaders’ perceptions and own stories of how their leadership has been adapted during the crisis. Thus, the study is based on a qualitative approach where data has been collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with seven unit managers working in the healthcare industry. The research is focused on theories and literature on leadership in the healthcare sector, how leadership adapts to various circumstances and leadership in crisis with focus on democratic and authoritarian principles. According to the study's findings, leadership in the healthcare industry is characterized by a democratic leadership style however was developed into a more authoritarian leadership style during the covid-19 crisis. This study is written in Swedish.

In a world where authoritarian states are taking a bigger place in the global arena, it’s important to learn from democracies and how a strong democracy can be upheld. The objective of this essay is to explain how Mongolia, a country with two giant authoritarian geographical neighbors in China and Russia still upholds a strong consolidated democracy. How did Mongolia develop from a history of communism to a free open country? This essay aims to explain Mongolia’s democratization after the collapse of the USSR in 1990 through the national internal factors of Larry Diamonds democratization theory; the development of authoritarian fragmentation and the development of civil society. The result illustrates that the development of authoritarian fragmentation led to competition between the elites, hard-liners vs soft-liners which in turn turned out in liberalization improvements. While the outcome of the development of civil society led to mobilization, protests and manifestations towards change and NGO’s got established which in turn lead to liberal reforms and economic improvement. The conclusion of the essay argues that the development of authoritarian fragmentation and civil society played a big role in Mongolia’s democratization in the 1990s.

This diploma thesis deals with the comparison of the political regimes of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia in the years 1991 - 1997 from the point of view of the theory of authoritarian regimes. The subject of the research was to determine the similarities and differences that the regimes showed in a given period. In the beginning of the work, the author approaches the theoretical core of the concepts of authoritarian regimes by Juan J. Linz and the competitive authoritarianism of Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way. The analytical part of the work consists of a synchronous dual-case study of Serbia and Croatia focused on the main aspects of authoritarian regimes and their subsequent comparison. The output of the thesis consists in a critical analysis of the features of both examined regimes at the level of limited political pluralism, the relationship between mentality and ideology and depoliticization versus mobilization and application of theories of authoritarian regimes to Serbia and Croatia in a given period. An important finding was that although the countries showed many similar features, the main differences were in the character of Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman. The work concludes that Serbia and Croatia can be included in hybrid semi-competitive...

Previous scholarship has long concentrated on the behaviors of belligerents during regime-dissident interactions. While much of the progress in the literature concentrated on the micro-level processes of this relationship, little research has focused on providing a theoretical reasoning on why belligerents choose to act in a particular manner. This project attempts to open the black box of decision making for regimes and dissidents during regime-dissident interactions in order to provide a theoretical justification for the behaviors of the belligerents involved. Moreover, this project argues that there is a relationship between the lower level events of political violence and civil war as the events at earlier stages of the conflict influence the possible outcome of civil conflict. Regimes and dissidents alike are strategic actors who conduct themselves in a manner to ensure their survival while concurrently attempting to succeed at achieving their respective goals. Although all authoritarian regimes are similar in their differences to democracies, there are significant differences between the regimes, which influence the decision making of the regime leader to ensure the survival of the political institution. In addition to influencing the decision calculus of the regimes, the behavior of the regimes impacts the probability of civil war at later stages of the interaction. Conversely, dissidents also perform as strategic actors in an attempt to gain their preferred concessions and outcomes. Although their comprehension of the coercive capacity of a regime is limited, their knowledge of the repressive capacity of the regime provides them with the understanding of their future fate if they escalate to violence against the regime. This project is conducted using two theories on regime and dissident actions and responses, two large-N empirical analyses of regime and dissident behaviors during nonviolent and violent dissident campaigns from 1945-2006, and two historical case studies of Egypt and Syria during the Arab Spring as well as the period preceding the uprising.