The notion that exists in society is that it is the politicians who decide while the public officials stand for facts within the policy process, and that they are active at various stages in the process. In practice, however, it looks different and the public officials have more influence than the theory predicts. The purpose of this essay is to investigate the influence of public officials in the policy process by studing whether the influence differs depending on the size of the municipality. We will also study the stage in which public officials have the most influence over the policy process in the different municipalities. To be able to conduct this study, the following questions have been posed: "How much influence do public officials have in the policy process in a small municipality and a large municipality?" and "which step in the policy process does public officials have the most influence, in a small and large municipality in Sweden?" As an empirical material, a survey was conducted in which the respondents were public officials in a small and a large municipality and public officials in a large municipality. We find that public officials in the small municipality have a greater opportunity for influence than public officials in the larger municipality. The public officials in the larger municipality have the most influence in the policy formulation stage in the policy process, while the public officials in the small municipality have the most influence in the problem identification stage.

Sweden has once been an emigration country, but as the years went by and as the world is in constant change, it turned into an immigration country. One of the most debated questions politically and economically is the employment gap between immigrants and natives. The available studies have mainly described the employment gap between immigrants and natives by human capital factors and discrimination on the labour market. The goal of this paper is to discover the correlation between the local factors and the employment gap between European, non-European immigrants and natives, on municipality level while controlling for education level and gender. Using data from Statistics Sweden and SKR, and an OLS multiple linear regression, we could capture this effect. The local factors studied are the unemployment rate, share of immigrants, share of low-skilled jobs and the size of the municipality. The overall results suggest that the region of birth does have an impact on the employment gap between immigrants and natives, where the biggest gap is between the non-European immigrants and the natives, which is in line with previous studies. Furthermore, both Europeans’ and non-Europeans’ employment rate is mostly correlated with the municipality size followed by the local unemployment rate. Taking the limitations of this paper into account, these results are only an indication and further studies need to be made to further insure the correlation between the local factors and the employment rate.