Taxation is strongly back in political economy. One of the gaps of this dynamic research program though is the unsystematic treatment of tax preferences. How should tax issues be conceptualized and measured? What are the determinants of attitudes towards taxation? Is there any systematic link between tax preferences and policy? This paper provides a fresh perspective into these questions by revisiting the political economy of taxation in the UK in the past four decades. Our mixed-methods strategy builds on three blocks. Firstly, we apply public-mood methodology to construct a new aggregate measure of tax preferences. Secondly, we account for some of the empirical drivers and effects of ‘tax mood’. Thirdly, we develop a narrative of the nuanced interactions between macro public opinion, party strategies and policy choices. Although this piece focus on the British case, our agenda is comparative. Our ultimate aim is to present an analytical and measurement framework which might be extended to other relevant cases, in both developed and developing countries.
This project is part of a wider research program on comparative policy moods, which involves an ongoing collaboration between John Bartle from the University of Essex and Anthony McGann and Sebastian Dellepiane from the University of Strathclyde. The distinctive value of our contribution is the application of the Macro Polity approach to the study of taxation. This includes the estimation of a set of tax preferences indicators on the basis of macro public opinion surveys.
