Chapter 6. The Fiscal Sociology of Public Consultation

Martin, Isaac William

doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479847273.003.0006

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…The fiscal theory of democratization (Martin 2015) is based on two major assumptions. The first one has to do with the state and explains its motivation in bargaining over taxes.…”

Section: Taxation and The Nature Of The Political Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Taxation-Democratization Link: An Automated Content Analysis of Cross-National Newspaper Data

Kananovich

2018

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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Taxpaying constitutes a major opportunity for citizens to relate to their governments. Although it is true that paying taxes is a responsibility, it also entitles citizens to claim control over government spending, which may facilitate a greater democratization of a country’s political regime. Consistent with this reasoning, a growing body of scholarship has documented a positive relationship between the size of tax revenues extracted by the state and the adherence of the country’s regime to democratic values. What has been left underexplored is the role in this relationship of the media, a commonly available and relied-upon source of information about taxpaying for the public. This study offers a first contribution in this direction, by exploring the relationship between the nature of the political regime and the rhetorical construction of the concept of a taxpayer in the national press. Based on an automated content analysis of articles (N=24,969) published by ninety-two newspapers and news agencies in fifty-one countries using a set of pretrained and validated machine-learning algorithms, the study demonstrates that the less democratic a state is, the more likely it is for the national press to frame a taxpayer as a subordinate in a hierarchical relationship with the state, by discussing taxpaying in tax collection, rather than public spending, terms. The study furthers a more nuanced understanding of the place of the media in the taxation-democratization link and demonstrates the applicability of the supervised machine-learning approach to classifying frames in large cross-national samples of newspaper data.

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“…The fiscal theory of democratization (Martin 2015) is based on two major assumptions. The first one has to do with the state and explains its motivation in bargaining over taxes.…”

Section: Taxation and The Nature Of The Political Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Taxation-Democratization Link: An Automated Content Analysis of Cross-National Newspaper Data

Kananovich

2018

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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“…Such studies provide evidence that taxation can lead to effective demands for at least some minimal degree of electoral representation, but they do little to clarify whether or how state officials' subsequent demands for increased taxation might relate to citizens' demands for increased consultation above the barest minimum. Although the fiscal theory of democratization also has been invoked to explain the emergence of such varied political institutions as aristocratic parliaments, municipal corporatism (Bates and Lien 1985), equal suffrage, and the popular referendum, among others (Martin 2015), abstract statements of the theory are often vague with respect to precisely which institutional arrangements satisfy citizen demands for accountability.…”

Section: Taxation and Consultationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections

Martin¹,

Nations²

2018

SocScience

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Local taxation produces consequential resource inequalities among public school districts, but little is known about how policy design affects taxpayers' willingness to pay for schooling. We show that voters are more likely to approve local school taxes if the policy is written to require citizen-state consultation on how the funds are spent. In a sample of 236 California school district elections, the promise of indirect consultation with a citizen advisory board was associated with a 3.7 percentage-point greater share of voters and a probability of passage that was 31 percentage points greater, whereas direct consultation with voters was associated with a 5.7 percentage-point greater share of voters and a probability of passage that was 32 percentage points greater, relative to a proposed tax increase with no consultation. These results provide evidence that citizens may trade increased taxation for increased voice even within an established democracy.

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“…“Democratizing bureaucracy” in the Bureau of Reclamation empowered some constituencies, according to Espeland (), but that empowerment was unevenly distributed among groups. Selznick argued that legitimacy concerns are often key to power‐sharing, and Martin demonstrates that, in later eras, governments increase public consultation when they seek greater extraction (). New groups may be empowered by informal and formal participatory regimes, but both types of participation may alienate some stakeholders (Lee ).…”

Section: Classic Studies Of Participation: Participation As Central Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contemporary observers find the 21st century to be in the midst of a high‐tech participatory renaissance across the institutions of US society, variously described as “The Great Consultation” and the “Age of Engagement” (Edelman ; Martin ). This veritable explosion of crowdsourced fundraisers, participatory art festivals, citizen journalism, and web‐enhanced dialogues has allowed Americans new opportunities to have their say in their workplaces and communities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Participatory Practices in Organizations

Lee

2015

Sociology Compass

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The literature on participatory practices in organizations has been less coherent and more limited to subspecialties than the literature on bureaucracy in organizations -despite a number of celebrated studies of participation in 20th century American sociology. Due to the practical nature of participatory reforms and the ambiguity of participation as a concept, attempts to review participatory knowledge have a tendency to focus on refining definitions and clarifying frameworks within subfields. This article instead provides a broad thematic overview of three different types of research on participation in organizations, all critical to an understanding of today's dramatic expansion of participatory practices across a variety of organizations. Classic research studied participation as dynamic and central to organizational legitimacy. Institutional design research has focused on participation as a stand-alone governance reform with promising empowerment potential, but mixed results in domains such as health care, environmental politics, and urban planning. Finally, recent research seeks to place participatory practices in the context of shifting relationships between authority, voice, and inequality in the contemporary era. The article concludes with suggestions for building on all three categories of research by exploring what is old and new in the 21st century's changing participatory landscape.

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Chapter 6. The Fiscal Sociology of Public Consultation

Cited by 9 publications

References 9 publications

Framing the Taxation-Democratization Link: An Automated Content Analysis of Cross-National Newspaper Data

Framing the Taxation-Democratization Link: An Automated Content Analysis of Cross-National Newspaper Data

Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections

Participatory Practices in Organizations

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