Aspirations Beyond Affluence, Quality of Life as a Political Goal in Finland Since the 1970s

Improving quality of life became an important political project in many societies from the 1970s. Although social and other scientists have noted the difficulty in defining what precisely quality of life is, or how it should be measured, this has not hindered but perhaps rather helped the concept take hold of the political imagination. In this article, I trace the conceptual history of the Finnish translation of quality of life, elämänlaatu, and especially how it was applied rhetorically in parliamentary debates in 1972–2024. I argue that quality of life became an aspirational concept in Finnish political language, through a discernible process of scientization and as a supposedly holistic alternative to “standard of living”. The primary source material consists of parliamentary debates, governmental reports and key works of Finnish social science. Quantitative collocation analysis is coupled with qualitative historical source work in an effort to show how the concept of quality of life was temporalized as an aspiration for economic policy and subjective wellbeing.