Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States. 2023. Oxford University Press.
Co-winner of the 2024 APSA William H. Riker Award for the best book in Political Economy.
Moving toward the Median: Compulsory Voting and Political Polarization. (With Alexandra Oprea and Geoffrey Brennan). American Political Science Review (First View), 2024.
Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Drawing on spatial models of electoral competition, we argue that, by reducing more extreme voters’ ability to threaten to abstain due to alienation, the introduction of compulsory voting can push party platforms toward the median voter’s preferences. This directly decreases party polarization, defined as the distance between party platforms. We examine potential normative and empirical objections to this argument and provide scope conditions under which compulsory voting is likely to decrease polarization.
Do Indirect Taxes Promote Accountability? Testing The Effects of Revenue Modality on Citizen Behavior. (With Brandon de la Cuesta, Helen Milner, and Daniel Nielson) Journal of Politics, 2023.
Governments that rely on taxation, rather than non-earned revenues such as aid or oil, have better outcomes along a range of governance measures. However, it is not clear whether all forms of taxation are equivalent; in particular, there may be significant differences between direct and indirect taxation. Indirect taxes such as VAT are often seen as less visible than direct taxes; indirect taxes may also not “bite” in the way that direct taxes do, as an individual typically gets a good in return at the moment of paying the tax. This has led to a perception that the accountability gains from taxation may hold more strongly for direct taxes. However, there is little evidence on whether this is indeed the case, or if so which mechanisms predominate. This paper addresses these concerns. We first use survey experiments from Uganda to show that indirect taxes are typically not visible to consumers when purchasing. We then use We then use lab-in-the-field experiments, conducted in Uganda, to show that when an indirect tax is less visible, it has a smaller effect on citizens' demands on leaders. Finally, we use cross-national data to show that while direct taxes are associated with lower corruption, indirect taxes are not.
Owning It: Accountability, the Resource Curse, and Citizens' Ownership over Government Revenues. (With Brandon de la Cuesta, Helen Milner, and Daniel Nielson). Journal of Politics, 2022.
Citizens’ willingness to punish wayward officials varies according to their expectations for government performance and across revenue sources---especially for taxes compared to windfalls from oil and aid. Yet little is known about what causes citizens to raise their expectations for public-goods provision. We argue that feelings of revenue ownership drive governance expectations, offer a new measure of the concept, and apply it in sub-Saharan Africa. Results from lab-in-the-field experiments in Uganda demonstrate that high ownership significantly increases citizens’ willingness to sanction poor-performing leaders, accounts for differences between taxes and windfalls, and mediates the effect of taxation on punishment propensity. We replicate these results in Ghana and offer further observational evidence in Uganda. Crucially, additional lab experiments in Uganda demonstrate that simple prompts can experimentally manipulate feelings of ownership for windfall revenues, producing accountability pressures equal to taxes and suggesting that focused public-information interventions might heighten accountability demands on governments.
Fault Lines: The Effects of Bureaucratic Power on Electoral Accountability. (With Pia Raffler). American Journal of Political Science, 2021.
This paper introduces a new explanation for why citizens may fail to vote based on government performance. We argue that when politicians have limited capacity to control bureaucrats, citizens will not know whether government performance is a good signal of the incumbent’s type. We develop a selection model of elections in which policy is jointly determined by a politician and a bureaucrat. When politicians have limited power over policy, elections perform poorly at separating good and bad types of incumbents. We test the model’s predictions using survey experiments conducted with nearly 9,000 citizens and local officials in Uganda. We find that citizens and officials allocate more responsibility to politicians when they are perceived as having more power than bureaucrats. The allocation of responsibility has electoral consequences: when respondents believe that bureaucrats are responsible for performance, they are less likely to expect that government performance will affect the incumbent’s vote share.
Foreign Aid, Oil Revenues, and Political Accountability: Evidence from Six Experiments in Ghana and Uganda. (With Brandon de la Cuesta, Helen Milner, and Daniel Nielson) Review of International Organizations. 2020.
Oil revenues in developing countries -- as windfalls for which citizens do not pay -- may reduce voters' willingness to to demand accountability from their government, enabling corruption, clientelism, and repression. This is an important causal mechanism underlying the resource curse. Prominent scholarship speculates that aid from foreign governments enables the same autocratic practices, but others counter that aid proves more beneficial than oil. Empirical work on the topic employs observational data at the national, macro level, and has left the question unresolved. At the micro level, domestic elites and citizens have experience with oil revenues and aid funds, thus possessing information about the political implications of these different revenues. This paper reports the effects of randomly assigned treatments identifying oil funds compared to aid money on attitudes and behavior of members of parliament and citizens in seven survey and lab experiments in Ghana and Uganda. Few differences in behavior or attitudes of elites or citizens toward accountability appear between oil and foreign aid that goes directly into government accounts. However, some significant differences arise between oil money (and budget-support aid) versus foreign aid channeled through non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The results suggest that elites and citizens both view oil and budget-support aid as equivalent but that aid channeled through NGOs is different in its anticipated effects and in its ability to motivate action promoting accountability.
Revenue Source and Electoral Accountability: Experimental Evidence from Local U.S. Policymakers. (With Adam Dynes). Political Behavior, 2019.
This paper uses a set of survey experiments, conducted on a sample of U.S. municipal officials, to test whether local officials are more responsive to citizen preferences when using tax dollars, as opposed to funds derived from non-earned sources such as federal or other outside grants. We find support for this theory, as well as several of the proposed mechanisms that could explain the findings. We find that officials believe that corruption and misuse of funds is higher for projects funded by outside grants than for those funded by local taxes; however, grants that require matching funds from the municipality attenuate the effect. We also find that officials are more likely to spend money on citizen priorities when tax dollars are at stake. Additional survey experiments explain these findings, showing that officials believe that citizens' accountability demands are stronger for tax dollars, and that there are higher electoral consequences for misuse of citizens' taxes. We also find evidence for a behavioral effect of taxation on politicians, as elected officials report a stronger moral obligation to citizens when allocating tax dollars.
All Sins are not Created Equal: The Factors that Drive Perceptions of Corruption Severity.
Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2019.
Despite corruption's effects on citizen welfare, there is substantial variation in when citizens are willing to take action against government malfeasance. This paper develops and tests a framework for understanding how citizens form perceptions over corruption’s severity. It focuses on two aspects of embezzlement: the identity of the individual engaging in corruption, and the details of the corrupt act. A conjoint survey experiment, conducted in Uganda, finds that a number of factors predict how severely citizens view corruption. Corruption involving elected officials, tax funds, or health care funds is seen as especially severe, while recirculating stolen funds through patronage or clientelism lowers perceived severity. Further evidence links perceptions of corruption severity to citizens' willingness to engage in costly political actions. These findings can explain when anti-corruption efforts, including giving citizens information, are most likely to result in higher demands for accountability.
The Structure of American Income Tax Policy Preferences. (With Cameron Ballard-Rosa and Kenneth Scheve)
Journal of Politics, 2017
This project employs an original conjoint survey experiment in the United States to estimate public preferences for progressive taxation across the income distribution. Modern income tax systems are multidimensional in that different rates can be applied to different income levels. Few contemporary studies of public preferences of the income tax measure policy preferences across the income distribution and none base those estimates on experimental evidence that accounts for revenue constraints. We find that preferences are generally progressive but that there is an important asymmetry in the elasticity of these preferences. Support for income tax plans is elastic with respect to policies for low-income citizens, with support decreasing significantly with higher rates on low incomes. In contrast, support for income tax plans is relatively inelastic with respect to policies for higher-income citizens. Although individuals support tax plans that tax upper income brackets more heavily than lower income brackets, they are indifferent across a wide range of these high rates. This result provides a new explanation for why public opinion about taxing the rich may have a limited impact on policy outcomes. We also investigate the determinants of these preferences and present evidence that income tax preferences are influenced by self-interest, beliefs about the determinants of income and the efficiency costs of taxes, and racial attitudes.
Marketing Taxation? Experimental Evidence on Enforcement and Bargaining in Malawian Markets (With Brigitte Seim, Simon Hoellerbauer, & Luis Camacho). Conditionally Accepted, American Political Science Review.
Understanding how to increase state capacity via higher taxation is a core puzzle in state development. Taxation is critical for states to fund key public goods, and taxation may improve state capacity more broadly. This paper argues that tax compliance is fundamentally a community-level, rather than individual-level, phenomenon. Because of this, tax compliance will be easier to achieve, and have more positive downstream effects on the state, when governments target community-level improvements. To test whether it is more effective to focus such interventions on top-down enforcement or bottom-up quasi-voluntary compliance, we ran a multi-arm field experiment in 128 markets in Malawi. We find that the bottom-up intervention, but not the top-down intervention, significantly increased tax compliance. The bottom-up intervention also increased trust in government, tax morale, satisfaction with services, and political engagement. The results show that community-level tax interventions can positively reshape citizen-state relations.
Tax Me Please: Pockets of Tax Support in Malawi. (With Brigitte Seim and Simon Hoellerbauer).
Low taxation hinders state development in many low-income countries, yet evidence on increasing taxation is limited. Successful taxation requires both citizen support and compliance, and existing theory suggests that there may be tradeoffs between citizens' tax support and tax compliance. This paper uses a conjoint experiment, conducted on small business owners in Malawi, to test the factors that affect tax support and compliance beliefs. We find high overall support for taxation, and limited evidence of tradeoffs between support and compliance. Support and compliance beliefs are higher when spending is transparent, and when taxes are perceived as fair in terms of the tax burden and spending distribution. Citizens also prefer taxes with strong audit enforcement, but dislike punitive noncompliance penalties. These findings shed light on citizen tax preferences among a critical group of citizens (small business owners) and in an understudied context, building evidence on how to fund development through taxation.
Mass Preferences over Sovereign Borrowing. (With Cameron Ballard-Rosa).
After years of relatively strong fiscal health, governments around the world are facing fiscal crisis, including looming debt defaults in many countries that previously appeared stable. There are also ongoing debates in the United States and elsewhere about the extent to which governments should rely on borrowing to fund budget shortfalls, and how (or whether) citizens understand the phenomenon of sovereign borrowing. Despite some recent advances, we still know little about how individual citizens understand debt, or how they form preferences over government borrowing, relative to other potential sources of government revenues. This paper relies on an original nationally-representative survey to provide evidence on American citizens’ understanding of, and preferences over, government borrowing. We first provide descriptive evidence that Americans have a weak understanding of government borrowing. We then use survey experiments to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that affect individual-level support for debt.
While corruption is a key challenge for state development, we still know little about what factors affect citizens' toleration of non-accountable behavior by government officials. This paper argues that taxation is a significant predictor of such demands, introducing and formalizing a micro-level theory of how taxation affects citizens' preferences over accountability. By taking away earned income, taxation pushes loss-averse citizens below their reference point, increasing the utility citizens lose from corruption and making them more likely to enact costly sanctions against such officials. The paper uses a set of novel laboratory experiments, conducted in Uganda, to show that taxation increases citizens' willingness to punish leaders by 12% overall, and by 30% among the group who has the most experience paying taxes in Uganda. Additional experiments confirm that this effect is driven by the proposed loss aversion mechanism, and a conjoint survey experiment demonstrates support for taxation's effect on citizen behavior among politically-active Ugandans.