The overall issue addressed in this thesis is the challanges to the Swedish welfare state. This topic has been the subject of several different interpretations in the academic as well as political debate in Sweden over the last decade. The first of two questions raised in this thesis is therefore what the main challenges to the Swedish welfare state are. It is concluded that the main challenges are the challanges to the representative democracy that originate in measures to meet the economic challenges to the Swedish welfare state by making it more efficient and rational. The main challenges to the Swedish welfare state are, therefore, a mix of interrelated economic and democratic challenges. A specific factor is tested for its possible impact on these challenges and that factor is third sector provision of welfare services. The second of the two research questions is therefore in what way and to what extent the third sector can influence how the identified challenges affect the welfare state. Childcare is selected as an example of a welfare service where there are a considerable proportion of third sector providers, primarily parent and worker cooperatives. The diversity, level of participation and service quality of different types of childcare is analysed with regard to how they affect the here presented challenges to the welfare state. It is concluded from this analysis that there are democratic benefits in the third sector provision of childcare that can act complementary to the challenged representative democracy. It is also concluded, however, that not all Swedish childcare can be provided by the third sector and that its democratic benefits therefore also should be produced by other types of childcare by imitating the third sectors active participation, small scale and independence. This study shows that Sweden is rapidly moving towards a greater diversity in its delivery of welfare service and that there are no policies or institutions for facilitating a more diverse service provision. An additional conclusion is for this reason that the outcome of the economic and democratic challenges varies with the direction of this diversification, which tells us that such policies and institutions are desirable. The Swedish welfare state will be getting a more diverse provision of welfare services regardless if there is any readiness for it or not and the results from this thesis show that the third sector is the non-public type of welfare provider that best facilitate the values and morals of the welfare state.

The subject for this paper is the Class Action against Skandia Association, a civil organization formed in 2003 with the aim of claiming compensation for some 1.2 million life insurance customers. The background to its formation was one of the largest financial scandals in Sweden in recent times, involving a number of questionable affairs within the insurance corporation Skandia and its subsidiaries, most notably the life insurance company Skandia Liv. The interests of both the stake- and stockholders of the company seem, in certain ways, to have been grossly misrepresented. The scandal, as well as the reaction it spawned, pose a number of questions. In this study, we focus on two: a possible, and in many ways apparent crisis in the representation of interests in Swedish society, and the role of civil society in upholding the balance between these interests. We argue that what is often held to be the ”greed” or ”immorality” of individuals in scandals such as Skandia is, to a great extent, a mere reflection of the ”rational” underpinnings of modern-day capitalism. We find that trust has been a key mechanism of control in the relationships between consumers and agents in pension and life insurance markets, and that ”the Swedish model” that distinguished post-WWII Swedish society was a model heavily based on trust towards existing models of bureaucratic governance. Furthermore, the increase in social and technical complexity of the systems and relationships necessary of our individual and collective welfare, as well as the growing anonymity of the people we depend on, seem to have resulted in a gap that cannot be bridged without resorting to trust. We also find that elements of the Skandia scandal mirror a larger societal development in which the balance between interests has been disrupted, causing severe breaches of trust. Over time, and as a result of a largely global interplay between power and discourse, the Swedish model has undergone a considerable transition, gradually transforming elements of the underlying institutional foundations of both the market and the state. Such transitions, and the herein observed inability of both market and state to cope with them while maintaining the balance between interests of society as a whole, make us believe that the importance of a vital civil society cannot be understated. The Class Action against Skandia Association is a testament to its potential.

Jag vill med denna uppsats belysa frågan om man i Sverige bör införa en allmän skyldighet att hjälpa nödställda. Syftet är att undersöka vilken betydelse en sådan så kallad civilkuragelag skulle kunna få för samhällsmoralen. Genom att använda mig av relevant samhällsvetenskaplig teori om bland annat medmänsklighet, moral, tillit, normer och socialt kapital vill jag sätta frågan i ett sociologiskt perspektiv. Jag har genomfört intervjuer med jurister och juridikstudenter för att få deras perspektiv på frågan. Frågan har jag sedan analyserat utifrån deras svar och utifrån de teorier och den tidigare forskning jag använt mig av. Resultaten av intervjuerna visar att informanterna i allmänhet är skeptiskt inställda till införandet av en civilkuragelag i Sverige. Nackdelarna, bland annat risken att färre skulle våga träda fram som vittnen till brott om en civilkuragelag införs, tycks överväga fördelarna i frågan. Man kan konstatera att lagen möjligen skulle kunna stötta människors moraliska tänkande. Informanterna såg dock andra faktorer, bland annat goda förebilder och en trygg omgivning, som mer betydelsefulla för samhällsmoralen.

Globalization now receives as much or more attention as any concept in the academic lexicon. While scholars and pundits struggle to grasp its complex and varied worldwide manifestations, few researchers have yet focused on the South Korean media and its relationships with state and civil society, situated as it is within a complex political economic terrain. The role of agencies and institutions, especially state involvement in the media sector and in culture more broadly, has been controversial for communication scholars. In the last two decades a dramatic upsurge of neoliberal thinking has glorified the virtues of unregulated markets, and so-called ¡°end-of-history¡± discourse has ideologically championed incessant deregulation and economic and cultural privatization. Many neoliberalist scholars have argued that human nature and the structure of modern political, economic and cultural activities are such that the more constrained is the state, the better will be the quality and competitiveness of the more autonomous realms of enterprise and civil society. By contrast, my aim is to provide a fuller understanding of the political economy of a national/regional, as well as global mediascape, and to offer a more nuanced analysis of the role of the state and civil society in global and local cultural transformations, by careful attention to the case study of South Korea. Specifically, I examine interventions by the state and civil society in transforming the scene of national and global mediascapes, focusing on their various policies, regulations, movements and other initiatives. While it would be absurd to deny the pressures on semi-periphery by powerful international organizations (e.g., the IMF or WTO), these global constraints and pressures do not wholly dictate policy outcomes, whether economic or cultural, and globalization is not an inevitable nor omnipotent force that utterly deprives societies of their ability to maneuver when they must decide on policy. Hence development or social changes are negotiated in a manner more complex than typically acknowledged by globalization scholars (from the left or right), and in ways that aim to open up closed and inefficient institutions and reflect local social conditions and its needs, and sometimes succeed in doing so.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the democratization process in Kurdistan on the basis of consolidation democracy with focus on arenas defined by Linz and Stepan (1997), namely economic, political, legal, civil society and arenas of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, I intend to explain Kurdistan’s road toward democratization in Kurdistan from 1991 until today, with a focus on the years 2003-2012. The main results are that Kurdistan has developed conditions that support a future consolidation of democracy. However, there are weaknesses in the economic situation, rule of law and the arena of bureaucracy. The arena of the political and civil society grew stronger after the US war on Iraq in 2003 and as effect new institutions such as political parties, opposition, election, political governance and alliances arose.

Chinese higher education has achieved a remarkable expansion in recent years but few studies have examined the civic perceptions and civic participation of contemporary university students. This study aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by accomplishing four main goals: first, to investigate how students view citizenship, civic issues, and civil society; second, to examine how they participate in civic activities, both on and off campus; third, to understand how their civic attitudes and behaviours are being influenced by society, university and family, also by such factors as formal citizenship education curricula, informal educational experiences and the mass media; and fourth, to analyze the impact of higher education expansion on civil society in China. This study adopted a mixed methods approach, and combined findings from a large-scale national student survey across 12 universities and 34 face to face interviews conducted in 3 selected institutions among the 12 that were surveyed. The conceptual framework drew upon social capital theory and both ecological and cognitive psychological theories to generate two analytic frameworks for analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data. The major findings were: (1) university students demonstrated strong patriotism, and a serious commitment to social justice and civic participation, which was partly the result of the distinctive form of citizenship education they received in the Chinese context; (2) half of the survey participants were found to be inactive participants in civic activities, which showed a disconnect between their civic attitudes and civic behaviours; (3) higher socio-economic status (SES) was associated with more active civic participation; (4) the mass media, especially the Internet was found to have a profound impact on students’ civic perceptions; (5) interview participants in the three qualitative case institutions revealed distinctive patterns of civic engagement, which confirmed the importance of university environment, policy, history and culture on student civic participation and citizenship development. This study has made a significant contribution to the existing literature on citizenship issues in contemporary Chinese universities. It has also added to current knowledge on trends of civil society development and the democratization process in China, from the perspective of university students.

Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping is used as an effective tool to grasp complex systems. Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, which is based on quantification of qualitative data, can be considered as a hybrid mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, and its roots can be traced back to graph theory. The basic purpose of this study is to discuss Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in methodological terms and develop suggestions for using maps drawn within two different frameworks. By this, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps applied in similar fields will be evaluated at one level. For this purpose, the thesis will utilize the data derived from maps drawn by NGO directors in Turkey. In the case study, cognitive maps are drawn around two concepts: the reputation of civil society in Turkey and its influence power. Due to their qualitative character, Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping is a research tool suitable for making comparative analysis. Divided into city and activity categories, the database of case study used in this thesis provided comparable data. Categorical differences are evaluated through drawing cognitive maps out of database.

Conventional wisdom holds that civil society building always strengthens democracy, and that civil society gains by undermining the state. Many studies have taken the case of democratic countries, such as the United States and India. However, the emerging civil society within authoritarian China raises an interesting question to the neoclassical hypothesis. Does civil society building necessarily leads to democracy? How do we evaluate the work of local civic groups and why does that matter? This thesis seeks answer through a case study of women’s organizing around the issue of domestic violence in China, exploring to what extent the growth of women’s organizing challenges or strengthens the hegemony of state, and in what ways transnational feminism facilitates the development of feminist activism in China. The case study finds a positive correlation between the increasing women’s organizing around the issue of domestic violence and the level of state intervention. Through closely examining the work of local women’s groups in China, it identifies the structural barriers and the state regulations limiting women’s organizing, but it also explores mobilizing strategies by women’s groups and the changes they have made despite the authoritarian setting. Ultimately, this thesis attempts to argue that civil society building is a political process structurally depended on the political economy of the state, and that the state also plays a significant role in “producing” certain kind of civil society. A situated analysis suggests that local groups adopt certain political strategies and prioritize certain issues over others under political, economic, and social constraints of their living environment, meaning that the strategies and focuses of civil society groups under the authoritarian setting in China will be different from the groups in the developed, democratic countries. Meanwhile, transnational feminism provides women activists with alternative discourses on gender issues and alternative sites for mobilization.

Chinese higher education has achieved a remarkable expansion in recent years but few studies have examined the civic perceptions and civic participation of contemporary university students. This study aims to fill the gap in the existing literature by accomplishing four main goals: first, to investigate how students view citizenship, civic issues, and civil society; second, to examine how they participate in civic activities, both on and off campus; third, to understand how their civic attitudes and behaviours are being influenced by society, university and family, also by such factors as formal citizenship education curricula, informal educational experiences and the mass media; and fourth, to analyze the impact of higher education expansion on civil society in China. This study adopted a mixed methods approach, and combined findings from a large-scale national student survey across 12 universities and 34 face to face interviews conducted in 3 selected institutions among the 12 that were surveyed. The conceptual framework drew upon social capital theory and both ecological and cognitive psychological theories to generate two analytic frameworks for analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data. The major findings were: (1) university students demonstrated strong patriotism, and a serious commitment to social justice and civic participation, which was partly the result of the distinctive form of citizenship education they received in the Chinese context; (2) half of the survey participants were found to be inactive participants in civic activities, which showed a disconnect between their civic attitudes and civic behaviours; (3) higher socio-economic status (SES) was associated with more active civic participation; (4) the mass media, especially the Internet was found to have a profound impact on students’ civic perceptions; (5) interview participants in the three qualitative case institutions revealed distinctive patterns of civic engagement, which confirmed the importance of university environment, policy, history and culture on student civic participation and citizenship development. This study has made a significant contribution to the existing literature on citizenship issues in contemporary Chinese universities. It has also added to current knowledge on trends of civil society development and the democratization process in China, from the perspective of university students.

This research examines the impact of formal democracy on the construction of an effective civil society in Ghana. The theoretical and policy role of civil society has received a great deal of attention in the literature. Especially for democratization theorists, the focus has been on the democracy enhancing qualities of civil society—qualities often credited with playing key roles in democratic transitions in Africa. However, the question of what happens to civil society after a democratic transition has not received much attention in the literature. Using a historical institutionalist approach, the study examines how democratic institutions and institutional arrangements affect the development of civil society. After Ghana’s return to formal democracy in 1992, democratic openings, though not immediately transformative, created an expansion in civil liberties and political rights necessary for the emergence of civil society. Paradoxically, state institutions remained weak and it was such weakness—not the strength, as some of the literature suggests, that allowed civil society to develop. Within the legislative and bureaucratic arenas, persistent institutional weakness became an opportunity for civil society to mobilize resources from foreign donors to strengthen the capacity of state institutions. Through programs aimed at enhancing the capacity of state institutions, foreign donors played a critical role in framing the relationship between civil society and the state. A major finding from this research is the symbiotic relationship between civil society and the state. As the case of Ghana demonstrates, where the state provides opportunities for civil society to develop, an effective civil society in turn contributes to building the democratic state. Findings from this research provide theoretical implications for the literature on civil society and democracy by highlighting the role of democratic institutions in strengthening civil society.