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The background to the thesis is the decentralization trend which has led to the development of various forms of local radio and television in a number of countries, including Sweden. Common to all official statements regarding the emergence of local media is the theme that local media has a potential for strengthening democracy. The aim is formulated as: to what extent can investigations into audience and participation in Swedish local media be considered indicators of whether these media contribute to the generally-accepted democratic aims of society? Special attention is also given to a study of the research field of "local mass communication" i this has been achieved with the help of a bibliographical analysis of the documents listed in the NORDICOM-bibliography for the years 1975-1980. The audience and participation analysis is based upon: (a) the author's own studies from the cable-tv experiment in Kiruna 1974/75; (b) secondary analyses of studies of audience and participation in Swedish local and neighbourhood radio 1979/80; and (c) the author's own data on local radio from a study in Västerbotten in 1978. The analyses in the thesis are based on two ideal models for the democracy-media relationship - the ideal-democratic model and the critical model. The results show that there is support for both models, i.e. local broadcasting media seems to both reach low-resource people and generate participation in various forms. On the other hand, from the point of view of the critical model, it seems as if participants represent well-established groups in society. The cable-tv data also indicates that activation effects are larger among the highly-edu-cated members of the audience. Other results demonstrate that the following factors are decisive for audience structure: size of the broadcasting area, occupation, and the listener's distance from the transmitting area. Factors that are critical for participation and contact-tendency are organizational activity and previous attempts to achieve influence in community matters.