The article contributes to the growing body of research on the politics of basic income by analysing the framing of the idea in the context of Finland, a country with a long history of debate and one of the forerunners in experimenting with this policy. Using a comprehensive dataset of political documents covering 36 years, the study shows how contextual factors and shifts in political climate shaped the framing of the idea. It also shows that the key frames describing basic income were widely shared among the politicians and parties discussing the policy. The study enriches our understanding of the politics of basic income by adding an ideational perspective that has for long been a missing element in this field of research.

This article draws on innovation and agenda-setting theories to identify critical points in the realization of basic income in Finland. Our empirical data comprise 13 models of either unconditional basic income or social security reform proposals with some similarity to basic income. The models examined were published in Finland between 1984 and 2011. Using these data, we build a conceptual framework that enables us to discuss the role of the content, players, political and macro-economic context, and public interpretations in the successes and failures of the basic income initiatives.

Finland is widely considered a frontrunner in the European basic income debate, primarily because of the decision by Juha Sipilä’s centre-right coalition government to design and conduct the first national basic income experiment (2017–2018). The Finnish basic income experiment builds on several decades of public and policy debate around the merits and problems of basic income, with the framing of basic income over time changing to fit the shift of the Nordic welfare state to embrace the activation paradigm. Underlying this discursive layer, however, we find several discrete, relatively small and unintended institutional developments that have arguably aligned the design of Finnish unemployment security closer to a partial basic income scheme. While the latter may suggest Finland has important stepping stones in place, important stumbling blocks remain and the jury is very much out on whether Finland would be the first European country to fully institute a basic income.

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The idea of universal and unconditional basic income is gaining increasing traction worldwide. Yet the proposal of unconditional cash seems to run counter to some key normative assumptions in society. This article contributes to an understanding of the political feasibility of basic income from the perspective of framing strategies to legitimise the policy. It examines a framing commonly used by Finnish parties and politicians advocating basic income, that emphasised basic income’s capacity to boost activity and labour market participation. The article finds that basic income was often defended with framing that appealed to activity as a value, and that this framing was most actively pushed by the Greens, and adopted by other parties during the upturns of the debate. The article provides an insight into a strategy of legitimising a politically controversial idea by framing it in a normatively and ideologically resonant way.