Political Coalitions and Willingness to Pay Taxes

• In Event: Welfare State Support in Times of Crisis

Abstract

Support for additional public spending is widespread in advanced industrial democracies, but few voters are willing to raise their own tax burden: most citizens prefer to fund additional spending by shifting the tax burden towards high-income individuals. While public opinion research has correctly identified who wants additional government spending as well as voters’ preferences regarding progressive taxes on high income individuals, the study of willingness to pay taxes remains underdeveloped. I argue that voters willing to pay taxes share a relatively high socio-economic status and a left-wing ideology. Contributing to the comparative political economy literature using occupations as representative of social class, I explore the degree of willingness to pay of different occupational groups, as socio-economic status and ideology relate to occupations. This chapter uses the ISSP cross national surveys on the Role of Government conducted in 2016 and the Risks that Matter survey led by the OECD in 2018. I find that the most willing to pay group are sociocultural professionals, the new core constituency of centre-left coalitions. In contrast, low-skilled service or production workers, the traditional core constituency of centre-left parties, tend to be unwilling to pay. Hence, not only do these groups differ in their expenditure preferences, but their divergent willingness to pay also creates a tension within the typical social-democratic coalition.

Author

• Olivier Jacques, University of Montreal, School of Public Health