Do Political Incentives Matter for Tax Policies? Ideology, Opportunism and the Tax Structure (original) (raw)
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Governments that wish to redistribute through budgetary policy do so mostly on the spending side, not on the taxation side of the budget. The taxation side is nevertheless important, partly because less efficient tax structures seem to be associated with lower taxation and spending levels. Hence political conflicts over spending levels may partly be fought as conflicts over tax structure. The paper provides a coherent perspective on the politics of tax structure. Specific topics include the (ir-)relevance of tax mixes, policy change in income taxation, the importance of tax competition, and the role of political institutions. -- Wenn der staatliche Haushalt zur Umverteilung genutzt wird, so geschieht dies vor allem auf der Ausgabenseite und nicht auf der Einnahmenseite. Die Einnahmeseite ist trotzdem bedeutsam, weil es offenbar einen Zusammenhang gibt zwischen der Effizienz der Steuerstruktur und dem Steuerniveau. Daraus folgt, dass politische Auseinandersetzungen über Ausgabennivea...
Voting with tax evasion: Ideological motives in tax compliance behavior
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Based on a theoretical model in which voters’ tax compliance behavior is driven by fairness concerns, we empirically analyze the channels through which ideological stances of individuals and governments impact on tax compliance behavior. Our data is from the WVS and the EVS and comprises nearly 48,000 observations from 23 OECD countries over the period 1995-2012. Our results indicate that the consequences of a change in government ideology caused by a shift from a moderate right-wing to a moderate left-wing coalition reduces the probability to exhibit the highest tax compliance level of voters in a country with average public sector size by 1.31%. This effect is twice as large in a country whose public sector size lies 5 percent above the average. These results highlight the importance of ideological stances in tax compliance and indicate that policy makers should focus their attention on the increasing ideological polarization recently observed in developed countries as a hurdle fo...