The purpose of this paper is to investigate how democracy is handled in textbooks on the market for social studies/civics and what view of democracy they have. The selected textbooks are written for Skolverket's curricula for social studies/civics 1b and 1a1, the study is carried out with a qualitative text analysis, which means that the text is interpreted with the help of Held's democracy models and a discourse analysis. The result that emerged was that although there were differences in the content covered, the textbooks shared a view of democracy as liberal and protective of individual rights, representative and something that requires knowledge to participate effectively. The view of democracy conveyed may bebecause it reflects Swedish society at large. The survey is justified by the fact that democracy is at the core of Swedish society, while the position of democracy may be threatened and the object of the survey because there is no authority that examines/approves the textbooks available on the market, which means that it is more difficult for teachers to know how suitable the textbooks are when they are purchased.