“DET MÅSTE TILL MED HÅRDHANDSKARNA” En kvalitativ studie om partiers motivering till att slopa ungdomsreduktionen

Abstract

With an increase of gang violence and shootings in Sweden, a majority of the political parties have submitted a proposal to remove the current youth discount that young adults between 18-20 receive off their penalty. This proposal has been criticized by experts within the criminological field for not considering contemporary science. Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to examine how the political parties in Sweden motivate their stance on this proposal. Three logics of human actions, mostly used within international relations research, are used in this thesis to study different motivations. These three logics are; logic of consequence, logic of appropriateness and logic of arguing. Within each of these three different logics, a possible motivation has been introduced. The logic of consequence can be seen as a democratic motivation, the logic of appropriateness an ideological motivation and the logic of arguing a use of conflicting research. Using these logics and the circumstances surrounding the submitted proposal this thesis aims to analyse the following question: To what extent do the political parties justify their stance to not follow the recommendations of the experts regarding the removal of youth discount with respect to ideology, voter preference and conflicting research? By conducting informant interviews with three different political parties from the Swedish parliament who supported the proposal, it was possible to examine to what extent they used the three motivations of justification. This thesis finds that the liberal party, Liberalerna, used an ideological motivation, the conservative party, Moderaterna, used both a democratic and ideological motivation, while the social-democratic party, Socialdemokraterna, used a democratic motivation.