Introduction

Abstract

This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between state and citizen while examining the limits of social contract thinking. Focusing on how citizens interpret and react to state efforts to promote fiscal citizenship, it sheds light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems. The contributors use tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. They also highlight how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state in the form of alternative religious and economic communities.

Tax and governance in rural areas: The implications of inefficient tax collection

“…“No taxation without political representation” (Locke, 1698), however, need not imply that there be no political representation without taxation. It may be useful to conceptually and practically delink taxation from understanding of the social contract (Bak Foged, 2019; Johansson, 2020; Makovicky & Smith, 2020), recognising that the basic rights of citizenship are not, or should not, be contingent on paying direct taxes to the government. Instead of a social contract rooted in tax payment and reciprocity in the form of services and political representation, strengthening the social contract in rural areas may mean expanding the political voice, rights of and services for marginalised rural communities, without necessarily expanding their tax liabilities.…”

Distributed fiscal relations and their imaginaries: Metaphors of redistribution and reciprocity in struggles about distributive justice in Austria

“…The topic of wealth taxation in Austria demonstrates the importance of the history of fiscal technology, the political registers, and the situated contingencies of actors' constellations when reconstructing actually existing fiscal relations (Roitman, 2005; Sheild Johansson, 2020). They also shed light on how debates about various forms of redistribution co‐constitute fiscal relations (Makovicky & Smith, 2020, 3).…”

Productivist fiscal deservingness: Entangled understandings of reciprocity and redistribution among German business owners

“…Karsten's and Frank's narratives complicate Euro‐American imaginaries of taxation primarily through social contract thinking. Hence, for a study of Euro‐American ways of thinking about political constituencies and fiscal relations, problematizing the idea of fiscal relations as a contract between citizens and the state remains essential, as Nicole Makovicky and Robin Smith (2020, 7) point out.…”

“…Some suggest that we should understand taxation primarily through the lens of reciprocity (Abelin, 2012; Björklund Larsen, 2018; Guano, 2010). Others highlight aspects of taxation that elude the idea of reciprocity and its underlying notion of the social contract (Makovicky & Smith, 2020; Sheild Johannson, 2020).…”