Does Taxation Really Buy Representation? Experimental Evidence from Africa

• In Event: Building State Legitimacy

Abstract

One of the most prominent theories in all of Political Economy holds that governments trade political rights for tax revenues from their citizens. This fundamental insight underlies important contributions ranging from accounts of the formation of the modern Western state to explanations of the "resource curse" produced by "rentier states". Surprisingly however, there has been little research investigating the micro-level mechanism underlying the rentier hypothesis: are citizens less tolerant of poor governance when it is their tax money (rather than e.g., resource rents) being wasted or stolen by governments? To test this hypothesis, we present original data collected from survey experiments conducted on nationally-representative population samples in seven Anglophone sub-Saharan African countries. These unprecedented data allow us to present the first rigorous test of the micro-level mechanisms of the political resource curse.

Authors

• Yu-Ming Liou, Georgetown University

• Zacchary Ritter, Gallup