Boxholm Tea Party: Taxation and Voter Turnout in an Unlikely Setting

• In Event: Taxation, Political Economy, and Voter Turnout

Abstract

The link between taxation and representation is one of the foundational mechanisms in explaining the rise and survival of democracy (Levi 1989; Tilly 1992; van Zanden et al. 2012) but some (see Herb 2003) argues that the connection was largely a uniquely early-modern European phenomenon. Hitherto, empirical investigations of this relationship in a present-day context remain surprisingly absent, particularly in the context of established democracies. This study remedies this gap by investigating how changes in tax rates relate to variation in voter turnout—a paradigmatic display of de facto representation.

Analyzing local tax- and turnout rates in Sweden between 1973 and 2018, I find that increases in taxation are substantially and positively related to turnout rates in Swedish municipalities. This result holds also when taking demographic and economic factors into account. Due to the practice of same-day voting for the national and local level, a baseline high level of turnout (a mean of 84 % for municipal elections during the period under study), and a largely automated and “invisible” system of taxation, the Swedish local case must reasonably be considered less likely for the taxation-representation link to reveal itself. Therefore, and in sum, these positive results illustrate the power of taxation as a boon to representation over two centuries after the American revolution, and suggest that taxation should be incorporated into standard models of voter turnout going forward.

Author

• Rasmus Broms, University of Gothenburg