Punching the Air? On the Contest of Framing Sweden’s Aviation Tax _______________________________ Leo Nyström Political Science, Advanced Course C (Bachelor Thesis) Department of Government Uppsala University, Spring 2018 Supervisor: Johanna Pettersson Words: 12221 Pages: 38 Abstract This paper set out to find out how actors have framed the tax on aviation, and compared the debates around the two times the tax has been enacted, 2006 and 2018. Connecting the specific issue of the aviation tax to the broader narrative on climate change, the framing process was formulated as a two-level game with both issue-specific frames and general master frames that have wider cultural resonance. The framing analysis was conducted observing the debates as a framing contest between frame sponsors (focusing on framing efforts from the aviation industry and the Green Party) in interaction with news journalists and opinion writers. The best way to describe the 2006 debate is that it was dominated by discussion of the tax from an economic standpoint, latching on to a master frame of economic consequences with regional impact. The 2018 debate focused on the environmental aspects of the tax, mostly disregarding the explicit effects of the tax and focusing on the harm of flying, connected with a moral frame together with a responsibility frame towards the individual. As I interpret the debates, the actor who effectively connected their issue frame to a master frame had control of the narrative, which meant for example that the Green Party did not get to discuss environmental aspects in 2006, and that they did not need to discuss economic aspects in 2018. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 4 1.1. Purpose 5 2. Background 7 2.1. Environmental policy in Sweden 7 2.2. The aviation tax 8 2.3. The SOU report 9 3. Theoretical Framework 11 3.1. Previous Research 11 3.2. Frame Analysis 12 3.3. Framing contests, issue frames and master frames 14 4. Research Design 18 4.1. Material 18 4.3 Analytical strategy 19 5. Results and analysis 23 5.1. The 2006 debate 23 5.3. The 2018 debate 26 5.4. Analysis 29 6. Conclusion 32 3 1. Introduction Sweden is known in the literature as one of the global leaders in undertaking ambitious climate change policy. They have coupled economic growth with market interventions such as the tax on carbon, switched out their energy supply to mainly renewables, and taken a position of leadership in international negotiations (Sarasini, 2009). ”Sweden is unique in that the country will over implement its international commitments, while already having among the lowest per capita GHG emissions in the industrialized world” (Zannakis, 2009:18). Even then, according to a 2016 WWF report, the average Swede is overusing the world’s resources to an extent that it would take 4.2 planets to sustain the same lifestyle for all of the planet’s inhabitants (WWF, 2018). In the same report, WWF’s main suggestion for the future is strong political measures to lower carbon-heavy consumption. When one of the planet’s best hope is 3.2 planets away from properly adapting to our Pandora’s Box of new challenges, something needs to give. Some believe in taming the forces of the market in order to switch to a ”Green Growth”, some believe in disrupting those forces completely. As this paper is being written, Sweden is in the zenith of the election year 2018. One of the election’s most hotly debated environmental issues is the aviation tax, which was implemented on the 1st of April 2018. The issue has gotten attention because it juxtaposes the two parties most profiled in environmental politics, the Green Party and the Centre Party. The Green Party, a currently governing centre-left party rooted in the 1980 environmental movement championed the proposal together with the Social Democrats, and the Centre Party with a centre-right progressivist ”Green Growth” approach are their most prominent opponents. The proposal sets itself apart in that it has an outspoken aim to limit carbon-heavy consumption (SOU 2016:83). It does not take the form of central investments to change market incentives like the country’s energy policy (Sarasini, 2009), it does not promote renewable alternatives like the carbon tax - the aviation tax is solely an effort to limit consumption. The issue is highly symbolic in that it sets economic development and CO2 emissions as direct alternatives, which depending on how it is received could open up for further taxation of carbon-heavy consumption, such as on red meat. It is intrinsically symbolic because the tax itself is likely to have no more than a 4 limited effect on its own: the state report’s prognosis is a decrease of 0.08-0.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents, a mere drop in the water for the world’s carbon budget (SOU 2016:83). The symbolic nature of the aviation tax is why I believe there is a lot to learn from studying the debate around the proposal. 1.1. Purpose The only thing we can know of the ”aviation tax” without any context, is that it will put a fee on flying. As with anything at all, the meaning which will resonate with people is socially constructed. In studying that meaning, this case is especially interesting because we can draw from the fact that history has repeated itself. In 2006, which was another election year, an almost identical aviation tax was decided on in another budget proposition from a Social Democratic government with support from the Green Party. As was also the case in 2018, the centre right coalition vowed to tear up the decision if they took office. They did, and the tax was withdrawn before it could be implemented, without much objection in the media (DN, 2006a). Today, things might be different. The Centre Party has vowed to remove the tax if they win the election, but polling says their electoral base have shifted to a clear majority that support the tax, and support among voters in general has gone up to 53% for the tax and 35% against, compared to last year’s 44% for and 36% against (Rosén & Kihlberg, 2018). When the tax was implemented in 2018, Per Bolund, minister of Finance from the Green Party was asked to compare the current and earlier debate: ”It has never been an easy issue to debate, even more so back then when knowledge on climate change had not come as far. There was a massive resistance and a fierce campaign against the aviation tax when the first proposal was put forward” (Frisk, 2018). Something might be different, and to find out what has changed we are going to study and compare how the aviation tax has been framed. Framing is defined as to ”select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (Entman, 1993). The aim of this paper is to answer the question: ”how have actors in Sweden framed the aviation tax in the media debate 2006 and 2018?” 5 In trying to answer that question, the purpose is to (1) gain knowledge on the reasoning behind climate action in the ”best case”-country on climate change (2) investigate on how actors can produce meaning in a dynamic framing process connected to wider cultural narratives. For the first part, what can be said for Sweden as a ”best case”-scenario might have implications for the rest of the world. If we discover that the narrative of sacrificing for the environmental good shows no promise in Sweden, maybe we should abandon the perspective and look at how to focus efforts on the ”green growth” perspective instead. If the ”sacrificing” narrative is shown to work, there is something to learn in which context and framing is necessary for it to succeed. That is where the second purpose of the paper comes in, to look at how actors construct meaning. To include actors in the analysis is important, because in the social construction of the aviation tax, different actors have different motives. Framing is a process that is both unconscious to participants and an dependent on active participation. Who says what is important to a situation where those involved have motives. To answer the question at hand, I will study the news coverage and opinion pieces written on the aviation tax for four months in 2006 and four months in 2018. The framing of the aviation tax will be studied from a perspective used by Ihlen & Nitz (2008) describing the process as a ”framing contest”, where actors compete with promoting their issue frames and by latching on to ”master frames” that have a wider cultural resonance. The actors I focus on is the aviation industry, the Green Party and journalists. The paper will begin with a short recount of environmental policy in Sweden in general, and the history of the aviation tax. A presentation of the paper’s theoretical framework will follow, with a section for brief review of previous research on the environmental discourse in Sweden, and a section describing relevant framing research. After that I will present the methodological framework, as well as a discussion on relevant design choices. Finally the results and analysis will be presented, together with some concluding remarks. 6 2. Background This section provides relevant background information needed to give context and understanding of environmental politics in Sweden. We here assess that Sweden has a history of strong environmental policy on the national level as well as ambitious current climate goals, after which we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the aviation tax.