This project proposes an in-depth examination of the politics of the Finnish basic income experiment (FBIE), which ran in 2017-2018 and was the starting point of (and a major inspiration for) the new wave of basic income trials around the world. Basic income trials have been very influential in pushing basic income onto the international policy agenda, notwithstanding they are controversial and the resulting evidence and lack of immediate policy impact has led to disappointment or even abandonment of the idea. The FBIE in particular is often characterised as a “failure” in this respect: the results are considered underwhelming while policy impact on Finnish welfare state developments appears non-existent.

In this project we start from the assumption that assessing the contribution (or failure) of basic income trials critically depends on understanding the political opportunity space available to key actors. The political opportunity space for UBI trials is a complex environment featuring legislative politics (political parties building a robust coalition to support a trial), governmental politics (key stakeholders pursuing their own agendas within the remit provided by a trial) and institutional politics (institutional, narrative and policy legacies operating in the background to structure opportunities and challenges for implementing a trial).

Our project offers the first in-depth examination of the politics of FBIE by combining insights from legislative, bureaucratic and institutional politics angles to be published as a short book. The objective is threefold: to provide a better understanding of (and necessary corrective to) the “failure narrative” of the FBIE, to offer important insights in the politics of UBI trials more generally through the in-depth examination of the Finnish case, and to inform the numerous ongoing and future basic income trials worldwide as well as the growing UBI policy agenda.