The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of literature within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards democracy, literature and library by comparing the attitudes in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. The theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. My method of analysis is a textual one, analysis of ideas and ideology, focusing on the aspect of signification of a text. The study has an effort of analysing the governmental policy in terms of idea and ideology. This quality study is based upon four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s. The analysis shows that there has been a change in attitude towards democracy, literature and library comparing the documents from the 1970s with the documents from the 1990s. The cultural policy of the 1990s is influenced by a market-led attitude whereas the cultural policy of the 1970s generally is influenced by a humanistic and a sociologic attitude. There are, however, rather small changes and the conclusion of this study shows that the attitude towards democracy, literature and library appears to be quite similar. The cultural policy documents from the 1990s rather show a tendency to a market-led attitude.