A tentative historicalpolicy analysis is developed to generate knowledge about local government policies and political legitimacy, as well as to contribute to policy analysis methodology. Social indicators, institutions and actors are used to gain knowledge about the phenomena. What local governments do to deal with and try to solve local problems is assumed to contribute to political legitimacy. The basic question that structures the thesis is to investigate whether, and to what extent, problem-orientated and "problem-effective" local government policy can contribute to political legitimacy. Time-series analysis shows that social malaise problems (poverty and unemployment) have fluctuated over the last 120 years, increasing in some periods and/or communities and decreasing in others. In contrast, problems concerning health and the environment decreased over the same period. Social policies appear to be closely related to local problems during the first hundred years (i.e. from 1874-1970), which indicates that local government policy is problem-orientated. After 1970 the connection between problems and social policy starts to loosen up. During the 1980s local infrastructure and industrial policy begin, for the first time, to follow social malaise problems in the municipalities. Earlier, infrastructure policy grew when problems were small or decreasing. The analysis indicates that municipalities were generally more successful in coping with local problems a hundred years ago. Health policies appear to have contributed towards solving local health problems up until 1970. Social malaise policies, on the other hand, have not directly contributed to solving local problems. Indirecdy, however, the latter type of policies contributed to economic development and promoted the development of local industry during the first hundred years. After 1970, only certain aspects of social malaise policies show positive effects on local problems. Instead, these policies generally seem to have exacerbated local problems. Attempts to resolve social problems, together with social service delivery, turn out to become part of the problem. The interpretation that legitimacy can be reached through problem-orientated and problem-effective policies has some empirical support in the period prior to 1900 and today. However, under predemocratic regimes, as well as during periods when democracy was highly centralized, the support for, and trust in, legality seems to be the dominate source of political legitimacy. / digitalisering@umu

One of the most general extensions of Buchberger's theory of Gröbner bases is the concept of graded structures due to Robbiano and Mora. But in order to obtain algorithmic solutions for the computation of Göbner bases it needs additional computability assumptions. In this paper we introduce natural graded structures of finitely generated extension rings and present subclasses of such structures which allow uniform algorithmic solutions of the basic problems in the associated graded ring and, hence, of the computation of Gröbner bases with respect to the graded structure. Among the considered rings there are many of the known generalizations. But, in addition, a wide class of rings appears first time in the context of algorithmic Gröbner basis computations. Finally, we discuss which conditions could be changed in order to find further effective Gröbner structures and it will turn out that the most interesting constructive instances of graded structures are covered by our results.