Punching the Air? On the Contest of Framing Sweden’s Aviation Tax

Abstract: This paper set out to find out how actors have framed Sweden's 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.