trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

environmental leadership (Uusi-Rauva, 2010). Already before the recent upsurge of public climatedebate, the European Commission urged the Member States to develop taxation based on carbon dioxideemissions instead of high car acquisition taxes (CEC, 2005). The EU also has an explicit target ofreducing average new car emissions to the level of 140 grams of CO 2 per km by 2008, and to 120g/km by2012.The proposal for a common European directive for transport taxation has not been accepted, but byMarch 2011 already nineteen EU countries out of 27 have followed the idea in some form or another(ACEA 2011). In Finland, the car taxation was reformed in the beginning of 2008 (Finnish Government,2007). The national level reform was based on EU level requirements for carbon dioxide emissionreductions. In the reform, the car tax levied on passenger car upon registration and the annual vehicletax were staggered in proportion to the carbon dioxide emissions (g/km) of the vehicle regardless of thepower source. On average, the car tax level was cut by about one sixth.The aim of this study is to analyze media discussion of the Finnish car tax reform, with a specialemphasis on environmental aspects of the reform. We explore how the environmental problems oftransport are discussed and what kind of an environmental policy measure the car tax reform is regardedin the discussion.2. Material and MethodsThe study builds from the agenda-setting model suggesting that the media may be influential on definingwhat the social priorities are but they have less influence on defining what to do about them (Cohen,1963; McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Pralle 2009). The agenda setting model does not assume a direct andlinear correlation between the coverage of specific environmental problem, public opinion and a policyaction. Instead, it maintains that by giving prominence to certain issues and framings the agendas of themass media influences public and policy agendas. The key media setting the public and policy agenda inFinland is chosen to be the research material of this study.The material was collected from the Finnish broadsheet newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (HS). The HSis the most widely read newspaper in Finland, with almost one million readers and a daily circulation ofalmost 400 000 copies (FABC, 2010). Because of the dominant position of the HS in the Finnish mediamarkets (Herkman, 2010) it is reasonable to assume that this material gives a relevant sample of theFinnish debate.The articles were collected from HS's online archive (http://www.hs.fi/arkisto). This electronicarchive contains news material published by the newspaper from 1990 onwards. It includes the titlesand texts of the printed material. The aim was to find all the articles that covered car tax reform andenvironmental issues. Based on testing of several search options, the following search string (withFinnish words) was employed: "(car tax* OR vehicle tax*) AND (environment* OR climate* ORemission* OR carbon dioxide*)". The search was performed to a period of 1.1.2006-30.4.2010. Thesearch produced 262 articles, from which irrelevant articles were deleted. Articles were considered asirrelevant, if they didn't relate to this particular car tax reform or if they only mentioned car tax reformbriefly and neutrally, without any comment on its effects. After this screening the material resulted 131newspaper articles that were included as the material of this study.459