Simon Matti

I am assistant professor of political science, at the Political Science Unit, Luleå University of Technology. I recieved my MSc in Political Sciences and my PhD ( 2003 and 2009 respectively) from Luleå. I have also studied at the School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment (SPIRE), Keele University, UK.

Teaching

Currently, I teach on the following courses: Comparative Politics; Humankind and Global Resources; as well as Institutional Theory (for the masters-program in Jurisprunence). Additionally, I give guest lectures on several other courses and programmes, mainly on the topics of environmental politics and green political thought. From autumn 2009 I also holds the position as program coordinator for the BSc program in Politics and Societal Development.

Research

My current research interests primarily deals with: Public policy; Values, public opinion and behaviour; Legitimacy; policy strategies and instruments; as well as issues concerning citizenship and democracy.

At present, I conduct research within the projects Deliberation and Valuation in Environmental Decision-Making: The Case of Multiple-Users/Multiple-Uses Resource Management (FORMAS, 2007-2010) and Legitimate Institutions for Carnivore Management (Swedish EPA, 2010-13). Read more about these projects at the Political Science Unit's homepage.

My thesis, Exploring Public Policy Legitimacy: A Study of Belief-System Correspondence in Swedish Environmental Policy, dealt with the issue of policy legitimacy, where the importance of legitimacy for policy perfomance constitutes the starting-point for a comparison of the normative principles embedded in political aspirations and expressed through the official policy discourse, and the beliefs and values held by those subject to the policy. In the thesis, I discuss the concept of policy legitimacy theoretically and construct a framework for studying and evaluating it. This framework is applied to the case of Swedish household-oriented environmental policy by the use of a qualitative analysis of Swedish policy documents (years 1994-2006) and two mass-surveys to Swedish citizens. The thesis was written as a part of the SHARP Research Programme, financed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning.