Historical Taxation and Representation: Actors and Institutions

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Historical Taxation and Representation: Actors and Institutions

How do states gain the power to tax effectively and how does representation shape the capabilities and priorities of the state over time? Our panel session investigates the historical relationship between taxation and representation by looking at three different sets of actors: creditors, local elites, and left-wing parties. Each paper explores the causes and consequences of fiscal capacity by disaggregating our understanding of taxation into the fiscal institutions, tax-collection methods, and types of revenue sources that states relied upon under different historical political conditions.

The authors set out to fill in important lacunae in the historical state capacity literature, namely the variation in old regime fiscal capacity and the slippage in the relationship between representation and redistribution due to the preferences of local elites and the constraining nature of electoral institutions. Saylor investigates the political forces leading to stronger tax institutions signaled by the shift in tax collection from local notables to salaried bureaucrats between 1600 and 1900. Kienitz explores the fiscal tradeoffs leading to the empowerment of local self-government to increase the state’s ability to collect direct taxes at the local level between 1800 and 1914. Andersson explores why left-wing governments did or did not shift taxes from consumption to income by analyzing the role of political institutions in linking taxation and representation between 1870 and 1945.

Together, these papers help move the study of historical taxation and representation beyond the revenue bargaining literature to consider the role of new actors and institutions in shaping the development of fiscal capacity over time and space. The papers feature a blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis in historical comparative perspective, blending new insights and data to revisit the story of how efficacious states are made by what and how they choose to tax and spend.

Chair
Jim Mahon, Williams

Paper - Creditor Communities and the Emergence of the Tax State
Ryan Saylor, University of Tulsa
This paper analyzes how creditors propelled the strengthening of tax institutions in early modern Europe. Around 1600, most European polities used non-state actors to extract revenue. Local notables collected head taxes in the countryside, and tax farmers wrested revenue from more urbanized areas. Over time, many rulers replaced them with salaried bureaucrats, because these agents were more reliable. Sovereigns consequently established primacy over their tax apparatus. To indicate the role that creditors played in these processes, the paper uses survival analysis to scrutinize a novel dataset on seventeen European polities between 1600 and 1900.

Paper - “No Representation, without Local Taxation”: The Fiscal Origins of Local Self-Government
Otto Kienitz, University of California, Berkeley

This paper examines the proliferation of local self-government institutions in the nineteenth century as a way to compensate for weak state capacity under a regressive tax regime inherited from old regime fiscal bargains. Drawing on an original dataset of local government reforms and sub-national revenue sources in Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and East Asia between 1800-1914, the author identifies four outcomes and one unique pathway to the empowerment of local self-government. The paper identifies the challenges faced by regressive tax regimes in the early nineteenth century, the opportunity for participatory and representative local government to overcome such challenges by raising local support for direct taxation, and the political forces aligned for and against local direct taxation. This paper combines a theory of the origins of local self-government with cross-national empirics on the timing and variation in local government reforms to situate local government at the forefront of our understanding of fiscal capacity and the redistributive consequences of taxation.

Paper - Ideology and Redistribution: Left-wing Governments and Tax policy 1870-1945
Per Fredrik Andersson, Stockholm University

This paper is concerned with democracy and taxation in the late 19th and early 20th century. Traditional political economy models expect left-wing parties to rely less on taxes falling heavily on the poor – such as consumption taxes – and rely more on taxes falling heavily on the rich, such as income taxes. Surprisingly, left-wing governments often rely more on the former than on the latter, but there is no consensus on why. Using a novel dataset on government tax revenue covering 31 countries in Western Europe, both Americas, and Australasia between 1870 and 1945, I find that left-wing governments tax income heavier than consumption in majoritarian systems, while they tax consumption heavier than income in proportional representation systems.

Discussant
Tine Paulsen, University of Southern California

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Creditor Communities and the Emergence of the Tax State - Ryan Saylor, University of Tulsa

• No Representation, without Local Taxation: Fiscal Origins of Local Government - Otto Kienitz, Johns Hopkins University

• Ideology and Redistribution: Left-Wing Governments and Tax Policy 1870-1945 - Per Fredrik Andersson, Stockholm University

• State Capacity, Enfranchisement, and Commodity Shocks - Victoria Paniagua, London School of Economics; Pablo Beramendi, Duke University; Melissa Ziegler Rogers, Claremont Graduate University

Chair

• James E. Mahon Williams College

Discussants

• Tine N Paulsen University of Southern California

• Didac Queralt Yale University