A vital part of democracy is the possibility to study decisions made by the democratically elected representatives. If this is not possible, one would have to argue that it’s not a democracy. One of the most influential researchers in this field is Robert Dahl. And one of his strong points is that if the citizens can’t study decision made by the government, how are you going to avoid abuse of the public powers? With this in mind the study was created, consisting of five medium sized Swedish municipalities (with a population between 80 000-120 000) archival regulations with a special focus on one of the municipalities, Karlstad. The object was to see if the archival regulation was updated to the Swedish archival regulation.

Research questions

1. Is the archival regulation based on the Swedish archival law from 1991 and was the archival regulation altered within the stipulated time frame?

2. Is the archival regulation based on the normal regulation (Normalreglementet)?

3. Does the archival regulation speak of the

4. Is there a discussion about why parts of the material needs to be destroyed (gallrat)

5. Which part of the municipality is the archival authority?

6. Is there s knowledge about the necessity of a plan concerning document handling?

The study showed that out the five studied municipalities four of them had an archival regulation based on the archival law. The fifth, Borås, had an older archival regulation.