Many discourses within environmental political theory center on reconfiguring political structures to empower geographically situated populations to become public stewards of their local environments. However, in the developed world the hope for ecological self-government is doubly challenged by the atrophy of the civic spirit and the general apathy of most citizens in the face of environmental destruction. In a search for an explanation of these cultural circumstances this essay gathers the sociological critiques of the techno-scientific epistemology and the public management of risk offered by Ulrich Beck with some social studies of the production and use of space. These critiques reveal aspects of everyday life that comprise a distinctly disengaged mode of person-world interaction. This mode of subjective worldly interaction frustrates any decentralist environmental politics because it distills in consciousness a depressed conception of personal agency, and constructs local environments as realms of imperceptible significances and hopelessly complex "scientific" processes, which must be ascertained by external knowledge and judgment producers. Communal, political stewardship of local environments requires trusting humanly scaled faculties of perception and engaging in the work of producing local knowledge and judgments. It therefore entails refocusing attentive faculties on the local landscapes that bind publics together and re-appropriating these environments as realms of participatory civic agency. This politicization of the immediate environment may be the best hope for instilling ecologically sustainable values and for reintegrating, and therefore reviving, currently dysfunctional public spheres. / Master of Arts

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In the mid-20th century the assignment of nurturing democratic citizens in Swedish schools, was first proposed and implemented. Since then, the democratic assignment has been put aside by the schools´ second assignment: communicating knowledge. The aim of this essay is to once again bring light on this forgotten assignment. I have gathered the material for this essay by interviewing five teachers of upper secondary school. By the use of three ideal types of democratic theory I then analyze the material to determine the teachers´ views on school democracy and their ways of using it in their teaching. The ideal types are participatory democracy, discursive democracy and representative democracy. The results show that the interviewed teachers share very similar views on school democracy, close to the ideal type participatory democracy. In their use of school democracy in teaching traces of both participatory and discursive democracy, can be found.

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Theory of human democracy The purpose of thesis is to analyse the question of human democracy and to find conclusion if this concept is eligible for society here and now. Author uses analytical, synthetical and historical methods in order to catch the goal of the paper. This research is dealed into universal part and specific part as a logical process. First author finds the problems and after that offer solutions. In concrete how to make from partial democracy, i. e. formal democracy, after accentuation her deficiencies process of changes to full, material democracy. The thesis is composed of seven chapters, each of them dealing with different aspects of topic. Chapter One is introductory and defines basic terminology used in the thesis. The chapter two is subdivided into two parts, where author describes genesis and short historical introduction of democracy and humanity. In Chapter Three the most important ideas of human democracy are mentioned, for example idea of humanity, freedom, equality and fraternity. Result of this part is of course fact, that democracy is expression of sovereignty of people. Last chapter in universal part consists of four subchapters, where analyse of relation between democracy and liberalism is. After that special part follows, which is divided into three chapters. First author...

The present study aimed to examine how support and trust in democracy was viewed among young citizens in Sweden. The study used a quantitative approach, in which a web survey was developed based on two well validated measurement instruments. The web survey was distributed via an internet site with 241 respondents age 18-29 years (M = 23.5 SD = 2.61). Four indexes were created (trust, support for democracy, autocracy and ideals of democracy) and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression models. The results showed that the participants had a fairly large support for democracy and did also have a fairly high trust in democracy. The support for other governance than democracy was fairly low. These young citizens in Sweden preferred participatory democracy over electoral democracy. A bivariate regression model showed an indication that lower trust in democracy leads to more active participation among young citizens. A multiple regression model however showed that females with a lower trust in democracy preferred participatory democracy and that males with a higher trust preferred electoral democracy. The authors argue that these important findings should be prioritized within the democratic discourse in order to be able to address young citizens regarding their concern and confidence in democracy. This in turn could give rise to more adequate efforts and decision making processes for both politicians and civil servants.

Hu, Peng. / Thesis Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2015. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-193). / Abstracts also in Chinese; appendix 2 in Chinese. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 14, September, 2016).

Drawing on interviews and archival material, this thesis examines how the crisis of the 1970s and the rising power of business under the neoliberal settlement that followed impacted on the BBC’s organisational structure, policies and journalistic practices. Part I focuses on the breakdown of social democracy. Orientated towards and legitimised by the social order that seemed under strain, the politically appointed BBC leadership took a conscious conservative turn and, under pressure from the government, sought to curtail the influence of union militancy and sixties radicalism and to stem its own ‘fiscal crisis’ through wage repression. Meanwhile, despite facing criticism over its economic reporting, which routinely blamed trades unions for the perceived economic decline and crisis, the BBC leadership refused to even seriously question long standing editorial conventions. This, it is argued, left an explanatory vacuum that the New Right were able to skilfully exploit. Part II describes the process of change that the BBC then underwent in the wake of Thatcherism. It argues that the highly unpopular organisational reforms introduced under the leadership of John Birt represented an institutionalisation of the new neoliberal order at the BBC. It describes how business journalism came to displace social democratic patterns of reporting as a result of both top down initiatives and a range of external factors including privatisation and financialisation, the changing political economy of the private media and the power of advertising and public relations. By analysing archival and interview material in the light of scholarly work on neoliberalism, broadcasting and power, the thesis offers an empirically rich account of the subtle ways in which journalistic norms are shaped by wider social forces and a more satisfactory account of the BBC and its role in British society than existing studies.

<p>The aim of this bachelor thesis is to make a theoretical analysis of the democratic development in the Iraqi Kurdistan and to distinguish its democratic character. It has occurred a radical change in the political structure after the Kurdish uprising in the northern region of Iraq in relation with the Kuwaiti war in 1991. The situation in the Kurdish region became more and more acute when they where exposed of international sanctions mandated under UN and economic embargo by the Baghdad regime. This political vacuum led ironically to the establishment of the political institutions in the region. The theoretical framework is constructed thru the democratic theory presented in Robert Dahls discussion of polyarki and Arend Lijpharts theory of consociational democracy. Thus my method of this thesis is a qualitative case-study research. The empirical sources contain one interview and the rest is different types of documents. The result of the study shows that the Kurdish democracy contains elements of polyarki and consociational democracy, but it fails on the fundamental democratic principle: freedom of speech. Even though there are insufficiencies in the freedom of speech, the Kurdish democracy can be classified as a developing democracy.</p>