MEDBORGAREN I KOMMUNENS KOMMUNIKATIONSPOLICY En jämförelse mellan tio kommuner

Abstract

The purpose of this essay was to examine the communication policies of the municipalities in Sweden and to test the significance of the hypothesis that municipalities that score a high point in an index on citizen participation more often mention and position their citizens as agents, subjects, active, first position participants or responsible in the course of events or activities that the communication policy texts include them in. Following questions were asked: What position are citizens assigned? What activities are citizens included in? How do the municipalities denominate citizens? The theories were meant to give perspectives on and describe the content of the communication polices of the municipalities. Chosen theories therefore include the definition of communication, the character and purpose of different types of texts and the grammatical content in individual sentences. The communication policies of the municipalities have been selected on the basis of their presented low and high result on the index of citizen participation. The systemic functional grammar or linguistics was used for the analysis of the content of individual sentences and to answer the current issues. The results show that the municipalities, in their communication policy documents, generally do not position citizens in a way that they are given influence over the activities or the organization of the municipalities. Therefore no connection is found between how citizens are described in the communication policies of the municipalities and how the municipalities perform in the index for citizen participation.