Motivated by recent claims from youth that older generations are jeopardizing their future, the purpose of this thesis is to study potential explanations for the variation of intergenerational blame attribution among Swedish youth. Ordinary least squares regression analysis is conducted on survey data, especially focused on young participants, to test several hypotheses about how perceived economic threats and one’s value orientation can impact young people’s motivation to blame elderly generations for economic difficulties. The thesis does not find statistical support that one’s birth cohort - used as a proxy for childhood socialization during different economic conditions - moderates the effect of perceived threat on intergenerational blame attribution. However, when a person’s value orientation is explicitly measured in a regression model, the findings indicate that characteristics acquired earlier in life can alter a person’s reaction to presently perceived threats. The result shows that authoritarians are more prone to attribute blame towards older generations as a matter of habit, but also that libertarians are susceptible to changing their attitudes to liken authoritarians given a tangible threat. Furthermore, the study provides empirical evidence suggesting that libertarians and authoritarians react to perceived economic threats differently. These findings are evaluated in relation to measuring perceived threat in a survey context and the linear interaction effect assumption in multiplicative linear models.

The Quran burnings in Sweden have made international headlines and have taken its place as one of the most controversial happenings of the year 2023. Due to this, the phenomena have made its way into the political arena of Sweden, being widely discussed by the main political actors of the country. This study aims to analyze Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrats) and Jimmie Åkesson’s (Sweden Democrats) communication regarding the matter with the key objective to analyze the usage of Populism as well as Blame and responsibility when the two actors speak about the Quran crisis. The thesis main method will be a rhetorical analysis. The study found that both Andersson and Åkessons communication regarding the Quran burnings contains populistic traits. Andersson uses more blame in her communication and Åkesson more accountability. Åkesson does unlike Andersson not construct the Quran burnings themselves as a crisis, but rather the sequence of events the phenomena consequently started as such. Due to the results in how blame is communicated, recommended suggestions of further studies could be analyzing if the Swedish political communication has become more hostile by doing a comparative analysis on the present and previous years of political actors communicating.

The current study conducted a content analysis of newspaper articles in a Florida newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel. The study spanned across a five-year time period from 2004-2009, featuring 198 articles on domestic violence homicide. The current study is a replication of previous research conducted using the same newspaper during 1995-2000. Victim blame, tone, and descriptions of the perpetrator and victim were among several items of interest. Findings reveal a slight increase in victim blaming statements and a larger increase in positive portrayals of the victims of domestic violence homicide.

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This dissertation explores the ways in which feminine culpability is verbally articulated by the male courtly lover to his beloved lady within the amorous relationship in three fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental novels: Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor, published in 1492, and two of Juan de Flores' sentimental novels, Grimalte y Gradissa and Grisel and Mirabella, both published in approximately 1495, and how these motifs of feminine culpability are subverted in the anonymous fifteenth-century Catalan chivalric novel Curial e Güelfa. This subversion of culpability motifs is facilitated in Curial e Güelfa since there is also a subversion of gender roles within the amorous relationship of the novel's protagonists: a female lover, Güelfa, who courts her male beloved, Curial. To execute this study, I begin by discussing the origins of this rhetoric of feminine culpability in patristic, Biblical and philosophical texts, illustrating their sedimentation into the collective ideologies of medieval audiences. I also examine these feminine culpability models in Provençal lyric poetry written and recited by Occitan troubadours between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, as one of its particular genres, the mala cansó, aims to not only blame the beloved lady, but also to publicly defame her, a threat that is also ever-present in the words of the male lover in the sentimental novel. After analyzing the tactics used by the male courtly lover to blame the beloved lady for his suffering and the demise of the relationship, I demonstrate how these same tactics are employed by the female characters of Curial e Güelfa toward the beloved man. However, feminine blame still occurs in Curial e Güelfa, manifested as feminine self-blame and blame between women, while the male characters engage in self-absolution, absolution of other men, and utter shirking of the blame. The theoretical framework employed is that of medieval canon law, and the way in which culpability was determined under this law from the twelfth century onward, which was by the intentions of the offender at the time of the crime or transgression rather than the consequences of the transgression. If we examine these fifteenth-century courtly love texts, it becomes clear that the beloved lady is innocent, while the male lover himself is the culpable party. Finally, following Rouben C. Cholakian's reading of the troubadour poetry through the work of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, I conclude that although the poet-lover verbally enunciates erotic metaphors and adulating language toward his beloved lady in the guise of courtly love, the true desire that he cannot articulate is to dominate, to overpower, and possibly to eradicate the feminine. Thus, in a Lacanian sense the notion that courtly love literature praises the woman is a fallacy. Both the poet-lover of the Provençal lyric and the courtly lover of the sentimental novel subvert the concept of alleged feminine superiority and exaltation in these texts. / Spanish

Den tidigare forskningen har visat att sexuella övergrepp ofta medför svåra konsekvenser för offret. Vidare finns en risk för ytterligare trauma i form av sekundär viktimisering, om offret möts av skuldbeläggning från sin privata omgivning eller rättsväsendet. I denna studie studerades svenska tingsrättsdomar för att undersöka skuldbeläggning av målsäganden i våldtäktsdomar, samt för att jämföra eventuella skillnader i detta avseende med misshandel- eller bedrägerimål. Vidare undersökte studien huruvida det förekommer utmanande av skuldbeläggning i domarna. Studien har utgjorts av en kvalitativ dokumentstudie med en tematisk innehållsanalys. Vidare har studiens teoretiska ramverk utgjorts av begreppen våldtäktsmyter, skuld och tron på en rättvis värld.  Fynden visade att våldtäktsmyter kom till uttryck i majoriteten av våldtäktsdomarna, vilket i många fall gav upphov till skuldbeläggning av målsäganden. Oberoende av måltyp identifierades även olika typer av skuldbeläggande diskussioner. I våldtäktsdomarna handlade diskussionerna främst om huruvida målsägande genom sitt agerande gett uttryck för samtycke. Sett till misshandelsdomarna handlade det istället om diskussioner kring målsägandens eventuella provokation och tilltalades rätt till nödvärn. Gällande bedrägeridomarna identifierades diskussioner kring hur målsäganden hade kunnat undvika bedrägeriet. Slutligen identifierades utmanande av skuldbeläggning av målsäganden i domarna, främst i våldtäktsdomarna. Avslutningsvis visar studien att andelen domar där skuldbeläggning förekom inte skiljde sig avsevärt mellan de olika måltyperna. Däremot identifierades ett större antal fynd av skuldbeläggning i våldtäktsdomarna än i domarna för de andra måltyperna. Således tycks skuldbeläggning av målsägande i våldtäktsmål vara vanligare, sett till mängden fynd, jämfört med skuldbeläggning av målsägande i misshandel- och bedrägerimål.