Democracy Spinning backwards? : A study of agency advocacy in Sweden

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to assess whether agency advocacy in newspapers debate articles has increased since the 1970’s and what forms agency advocacy take. This is done by investigating if the number or share of debate articles written by agencies increased from the 1970’s to the 2000’s, what types of communication approaches and subjects that are used over the years. The theoretical approach is based on research about new public management (NPM) and mediatisation through a normative institutionalist perspective. It is mainly a quantitative study where we collect debate articles from four different decades and code the content according to three ideal types: information, agency advocacy by promoting issue and agency advocacy by legitimating agency.  The thesis finds that the share and to some extent the number of debate articles has increased over the years, which supports the NPM theory and in part mediatisation theory. All ideal types are present; agency advocacy exists in all analysed debate articles while information is highly absent.  There is little change over the years which make it difficult to assess which theory that is supported.