The Swedish school has a dual mission. To promote students´ desire for lifelong learning and to foster students as good citizens. In this mission, democratic competence and civic competence are discussed. This study aims to explore what these competencies are and how they are expressed in Swedish social studies textbooks. The relationship between the curriculum and the textbooks is also of interest, and it is part of the research questions of this study to determine whether an equity problem arises when the curriculum states one thing while the textbooks provide different conditions for achieving its content. The method used is qualitative text analysis, where classifications will help sort out knowledge about society and knowledge of democratic forms. The results of the study show that vocational program textbooks fail to contribute to the same level of democratic competence as in college preparatory programs, which poses a problem as knowledge is not valued equally in these different programs.