This study is about the two largest and longest existing parties in Sweden, The Social Democrats, and The Moderate Party. These two parties have two different classical ideologies as their foundation which are socialism and conservatism. The question is then, have these political parties deviated from their classical ideological background? Moreover, if the parties’ positions are compared with the new scale GAL-TAN, are they more similar or dissimilar compared to when comparing the ideologies? The essay will present an explanation on what the new scale GAL-TAN is and then discuss the scale compared to the ideologies. The conclusion is that when the two parties are compared with their ideology, The Moderate Party has deviated the most from conservatism. The Social Party still follows socialism but with a modern adaptation. However, The Moderate Party has more in common with socialism than the Socialist Party has with conservatism. Moreover, the two parties’ position on the GAL-TAN-scale is very close but, The Moderate Party’s position is stronger because they focus more on individualism.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate to which extent two Swedish political parties, founded in the early 1900s, represents changes in public opinion. The question of issue to be answered is to which extent the Social Democrats and the Moderates represents their former voters´ opinions. The question of issue will be investigated throughout a comparison of party politics and public opinion in 2014 and 2018, the years Sweden had parliamentary elections. The analysis was performed by applying the GAL-TAN and left-right division on these data. The results shows how there has been a change in politics between these years among both the parties and voters. The change in public opinion is reflected in party politics in areas such as immigration and law and order but there are parts of politics that is considered irrelevant for how the voters choose to vote. The Social Democrats and Moderates are capable of representing changes in public opinion to some extent.

This thesis deals with the nature of the Left-Right scale. Theories and ideas about the Left-Right scale have been tested by a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. The research questions are, in short, firstly if voters’ preferences on political issues, where economic issues are tested in this specific thesis, can consistently explain voters’ Left-Right self-placement, secondly if this level of explanation can vary depending on changes in national political discourse, and finally if a high level of correlation between issue and Left-Right self-placement facilitates the matching process of parties and voters of similar ideological conviction. A regression is run on data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, data which consists of survey questions about attitudes towards economic preferences and self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The selection is restricted to old democracies, as there is some discrepancy between new and old democracies with regards to the capacity of the electorate to relate to the Left-Right scale. The independent variable in this regression is attitudes toward different economic issues, while the dependent variable is self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The first question is answered by the regression, which is if preferences regarding issues can explain self-placement on the Left-Right scale. The answer that is given is that there is indeed a consistent relationship between preferences on economic issues and self-placement on the Left-Right scale, over time. Albeit it is higher for some countries, like Scandinavia, and lower for other countries, like Japan and Ireland. The two remaining questions are answered by case studies, selected through the method of least likely and most likely cases. These are Netherlands, Sweden, Japan and France. In essence, these cases show that the Left-Right scale is indeed flexible, and can adapt to the current political discourse, and that a high relationship between preferences on political issues and self-placement on the Left-Right scale facilitates the matching of voters and parties of similar ideological conviction.

Fabry disease (FD) is an X-linked recessive lysosomal storage disorder (LSD) known to affect approximately 1 in every 40,000 males, and a smaller number of females. FD results from a deficiency of functional α-galactosidase (α-GAL), which leads to the accumulation of terminally α-galactosylated substrates in the lysosome. The predominant treatment is Enzyme Replacement Therapy (ERT), requiring the regular infusion of recombinant human α-GAL. More than half of individuals receiving ERT experience a range of adverse infusion reactions, and it has been reported that as many as 88% of patients receiving ERT develop neutralizing IgG antibodies against the drug. In aim of designing a non-immunogenic treatment candidate for Fabry disease ERT, we have engineered the active sites of α-GAL and another homologous family 27 exoglycosylase named α-N-acetylgalactosaminidase (α-NAGAL) to have interconverted substrate specificities. 11 of 13 active site residues are conserved between these two enzymes, and we have shown that their substrate specificities can be interconverted by mutating the two non-conserved active-site residues. We report the kinetic properties of these two mutants along with wild type controls, and use western blotting to show that both mutant enzymes retain their respective wild type enzyme antigenicity. Structural data obtained by X-ray crystallography on the α-GAL mutant (called α-GALSA ) reveals the mechanism by which substrate specificity is dictated between these two proteins, and provides explanations for the mutant’s reduced catalytic efficiency.

No description available.

There have been discussions about why men in Sweden to a greater extent vote for right-wing parties, the discussion about why women, on the other hand, vote on the left-wing parties is less often discussed. What really makes women and men vote so differently in a supposedly equal country like Sweden? This essay is a quantitative study where the aim is to contribute to increased understanding of the different voting preferences. The data used in the essay comes from the SOM institute from the University of Gothenburg. Previous research has shown that a shift took place around the 60s and onwards, women then started getting an education and jobs that did not only involve the home and family. With this, women began to vote more on the left-wing parties. Regression analysis and factor analysis have been carried out to find connections between how different perceptions of violence and socio-economic factors influence whether one votes left or right. The theoretical frameworks for this essay are the silent revolution, GAL-TAN and ethics of care. The results show that there are differences between women's and men's political preferences, where women are more to the left and men more to the right on the political left-right scale. The cultural factor ethics of care is connected to the aspect that social vulnerability is considered to be a contributing factor to the violence in society, and is the factor that most affects the gender gap in political preferences. The impact that structural factors have on political preferences is consistent with previous research. Finally, we have discussed limitations and recommendations for future research.

Hemocompatibility tuning was adopted to explore and refine an innovative, GA-free preparation strategy combining decellularization, riboflavin/UV crosslinking, and low-energy electron irradiation (SULEEI) procedure. A SULEEI-protocol was established to avoid GA-dependent deterioration that results in insufficient long-term aortic valve bioprosthesis durability. Final SULEEI-pericardium, intermediate steps and GA-fixed reference pericardium were exposed in vitro to fresh human whole blood to elucidate effects of preparation parameters on coagulation and inflammation activation and tissue histology. The riboflavin/UV crosslinking step showed to be less efficient in inactivating extracellular matrix (ECM) protein activity than the GA fixation, leading to tissue-factor mediated blood clotting. Intensifying the riboflavin/UV crosslinking with elevated riboflavin concentration and dextran caused an enhanced activation of the complement system. Yet activation processes induced by the previous protocol steps were quenched with the final electron beam treatment step. An optimized SULEEI protocol was developed using an intense and extended, trypsin-containing decellularization step to inactivate tissue factor and a dextran-free, low riboflavin, high UV crosslinking step. The innovative and improved GA-free SULEEI-preparation protocol results in low coagulant and low inflammatory bovine pericardium for surgical application.

This thesis aims to map what arguments are used by the two biggest parties in Swedish politics, The Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party, when discussing European politics in the European Affairs Committee (EAC) of the Swedish parliament. In order to realise this, frames used by the party representatives in the committee have been analysed. With the typology of Helbling et. al. (2010), a categorisation of four frames is applied, where each frame corresponds with a side of the left-right or the GAL-TAN-dimension. The study is structured by a number of hypotheses constructed based on findings of previous research, comparing both between the parties and changes over time. The results are assessed in relative terms, meaning that the study focuses on the parties’ relative use of frames rather than the absolute. All hypotheses find full or partial support, confirming expectations of previous research made on other European countries. However, some surprising results are found, highlighting new potential research questions for future studies.

The Swedish People’s Party have for over one hundred years functioned as a political tool for the liberals and center-right of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. As a party the SPP stands out in comparison to most other European minority parties as not working for regional self-governance or independence, but instead wanting to uphold constitutional language and service rights. The SPP was a part of every coalition government in Finland from 1979 to 2015 and has held multiple ministerial posts despite only having approximately 5% of the votes. The aim of this essay has been to examine the variance in the value based political issues in the SPP to see if there is a divergence on a liberal/conservative divide within the party. With a theoretical framework based on the GAL-TAN political scale, a socially based dimension of measuring party positions, I have operationalized a liberal and conservative stance to Weberian ideal types, and by first e-mail interviewing party representatives to build a frame of issues to investigate, I have then performed an idea based content analysis by examining motions from 2009 to 2017. The results show that, even though there are a divergence between some of the proposals themselves, and in some cases, between the official party line as described in the party program, the differences are too insignificant to draw conclusions from. The conflict between the motions speaking for and against nuclear power stands out as being very even, while the motions concerning Finland joining NATO stands out as being fully for.

Uppsatsen “Nuförtiden får man ju inte säga ett skit” ‘ är en debattanalys av Europaparlamentarikers kritik gentemot politisk korrekthet i EU. Studien tar ett avstamp i tidigare forskning berörande populism, euroscepticism, GAL-TAN dimensionen, och applicerar detta till ett inte tidigare tillämpat teoretiskt perspektiv för denna typ av forskning, politisk korrekthet. Syftet med studien är att beskriva och kategorisera de huvudteser samt argument som förs i kritiken gentemot ett påstått PK-etablissemang i EU:s viktigaste och enda demokratiskt valda organ. De huvudteser som återfanns i argumentationen var följande: att EU består av ett etablissemang som underminerar EU-medborgarnas sanna vilja med PK-het, att EU är i politisk kris då yttrandefriheten förtrycks, att EU bär på en dubbelmoral av vilka åsikter som får uttryckas och inte, att EUs överstatlighet försummar nationernas egna intressen, och att PK- etablissemanget i EU förvrider den objektiva sanningen och kallar sina motståndarna för populister likt ett retoriskt vapen. Det nytillämpade teoretiska perspektivet, PK, bidrar med ett nytt synsätt på den politiska debatten och de dimensioner av sociala normer som tycks styra det politiska talrummet.