Trusting the Tax Office: Does Putnam's Thesis Relate to Tax?

Abstract

Data from the Community Participation and Citizenship Survey are used to explore the factors that infl uence people to place trust in strangers and impersonal others. We use Putnam's social capital thesis to explore whether civic engagement and associational membership are major factors in the development of generalised or social trust, and whether this kind of trust is generalisable to trust in government institutions, specifi cally the Tax Offi ce. There is partial support for Putnam's thesis that civic engagement develops social trust. More important is affective trust developed in the family and through familiar others. We fi nd that trust is generalisable, being extended to strangers and to the impersonal others in government institutions. It is trust that builds trust -and government institutions like the Tax Offi ce begin their task with benefi ts accrued through generalised trust.

The Multiplicity of Taxpayer Identities and Their Implications for Tax Ethics

“…Whether they are of oppositional or conforming nature, among moral factors, personal ethics and legitimacy can be considered the most proximal predictors of tax compliance, with personal ethics being attributable to the person (i.e., oneself ) and legitimacy being attributable to the system or authority. Personal ethics depend on one's socialization, the perceived social norms of one's reference groups, and one's trust in other people (which may then also extend to the tax authority and thus to legitimacy; Job & Reinhart 2003). Perceptions of legitimacy depend on the perceived justice of the tax system, trust in the tax authority based on the perceived fairness of its procedures and conduct (see Tyler & Huo 2002), and the institution's perceived representativeness of oneself or one's relevant social group and its goals and values (see Turner & Haslam 2001).…”

Anomie and Violence. Non-truth and Reconciliation in Indonesian Peacebuilding

“…It is a more general idea in paradigmatic shifts in sociology towards micro-macro explanation in network terms (Castells 1996). For example, Job and Reinhart (2003) find empirically that social capital does not issue mainly from associations in civil society, as Putnam's (2000) theory suggests, let alone downwards from state structures. Rather individuals learn to do things such as trust prudently and generously in the primary institutions of their families and immediate work groups.…”

Spill‐Up and Spill‐Over of Trust: An Extended Test of Cultural and Institutional Theories of Trust in South Korea1

“…Two theoretical approaches offer different explanations of trust in institutions: cultural theories that concentrate on exogenous factors such as citizens’ personal networks and civic engagement and institutional theories that focus on endogenous factors and the consequences of performance evaluations on variations in political trust (Mishler and Rose, 2001; Newton and Norris, 2000). Scholars working from the cultural perspective assume that trust in political institutions is derived from interpersonal trust developed during early socialization: individuals learn to trust or distrust others based on personal interactions and gradually form a generalized sense of trust in the world (Eckstein, 1966; Eckstein et al, 1998; Job, 2005, 2006; Job and Reinhart, 2003; Paxton, 2007). Based on dissimilar personal traits and experiences, some individuals develop optimistic worldviews and are willing to cooperate with others, which, in turn, leads to a greater degree of trust in public institutions.…”