Independent public libraries? : An ideological analysis of political ideologies influence on public libraries

The subject this thesis will investigate concerns the matter of how political ideologies exist within public libraries with a focus on the democratic ideal. Public libraries are part of the political system and we want to show how political ideologies take their shape in public libraries and the possible consequences of this. With the help of three major political ideologies, liberalism, conservatism and socialism we investigate how the democratic ideals of these ideologies are expressed in documents that describes activities the libraries will and have performed. In order to identify these ideologies we use discourses in cultural policy as a bridge between the investigated documents and the political ideologies. As an analytical tool we have developed a model that describes the relation between text, discourse and ideology which we use in our analysis. The results of our analysis shows that there is an imbalance concerning how much influence the different ideologies have over the activities in the public libraries, where we have seen that the liberal ideals have the upper hand. These results are similar to those of previous researchers and we think it is important for the public libraries to be aware of the influence political ideologies have over cultural policy, on all levels, in order to be an objective institution for the citizens in our society