Panel on Fiscal Sociality: Beyond the Social Contract

Abstract

Much of our contemporary thinking on state–society relations rests on the idea of a social contract. Rooted in Enlightenment political theory, the term refers to an “imagined” initial contract in which individuals accepted the authority and legitimacy of rulers and paid taxes in exchange for valued returns—particularly protection of themselves and their property, and some measure of representation and accountability. For fiscal scholars, the experience of Anglo-European models of state formation attests to how taxation came to represent the material expression of the social contract. To raise taxes and cover the escalating costs of war, rulers had to bargain and make concessions to secure compliance, including expanding accountability, political representation and delivering collective goods and services. It was these iterated bargains between rulers and taxpayers that ultimately became the basis of the social contract. In recent years, scholars have been particularly concerned with unpacking why social contracts remain weak in many parts of the developing world. Political scientists who have long emphasised the governance dividends of taxation have focused on the centrality of taxation in improving accountability and political representation. While these preoccupations remain relevant, academic and lay instantiations continue to mobilise the social contractual framing as an unproblematic conceptual and normative ideal. Specifically, in place of a single story of state-society relations that draws mainly on Anglo-European histories, there has been a tendency to naturalise the relationship between taxation, state authority and political representation. Even as recent evidence suggests that the links between taxation, responsiveness and accountability are often indirect, long-term and difficult to observe. Additionally, the emphasis on common agreement and harmonised consensus has obscured the politics and inequities of power that may also underpin state-society interactions. This has contributed to a broader under-theorisation of political relationships, particularly the political-economy constraints that impede domestic resource mobilisation and obstruct the implementation of transparent, effective and equitable tax policies. Lastly, scholarship within related disciplines of anthropology has argued that the contractual framing also transposes liberal ideas of self-seeking individualism and contractual logics into the political realm. Yet, contemporary experiences in many countries (developing but also developed) suggest that citizens understand their relationship to the state in ways that extend beyond contractual terms, including through ideas of reciprocity, “fair share,” or a mutually agreed-upon moral order. Thus, different forms of fiscal sociality may exist that imagine fiscal systems in ethical rather than merely contractual terms. This panel calls for papers that address these themes, problematise and interrogate the social-contractual framing, and offer theoretical and empirical insights grounded in quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research. Specifically, it calls for papers that explore the political dynamics, relational modes, and forms of sociality that shape state–society interactions and extend beyond and critically engage with the assemblage of the “social contract",

Title	Details
(Re-)Defining the Social Contract: Fiscal Citizenship and the Power of an Idea in Three Former Socialist Towns in the Baltics	View Paper Details
Taxing for a Social Contract in Sub-Saharan Africa	View Paper Details
After the Decision: The Political Economy of Presumptive Tax Reforms in Uganda	View Paper Details
Why Presumptive Taxation Fails: Interpretive Evidence from Urban Tanzania	View Paper Details
Non-Contractarian Thinking in Bolivia’s Fiscal System	View Paper Details