The stability of political systems depends on legitimacy as well as on material support, particularly on services rendered and on taxes paid. In this paper, we turn to the latter and show that taxes are a specific medium of political systems to secure support and to form political identities at the same time. We will proceed in three steps: First, we argue that taxes have a twofold effect on the formation of people’s identities. On the one hand, they interpellate “taxpayers” as members of the same political system. This fiscal identification comes with a range of options: positive identification like pride in aggregated fiscal power (the German tax collective within Europe), neutral or rationalistic self-descriptions as bearers of entitlements (to security, infrastructure, social benefits) or negative identification, for example as victims of a larcenous coercive system (cf. the Boston Tea Party). In any case, by paying taxes the people are produced as a collective. On the other hand, tax systems introduce differentiations into this collectivity: Taxes offer identities among the rich and the poor, as family members, as workers, as consumers etc. Therefore, tax systems at the same time form a collective and a plurality, or what one might call a differentiated collective. Secondly, we argue that the fiscal stability of a system depends on two factors: forging a collective that is to a significant degree based on positive identification; and managing the balance between collective and plural identity. Thirdly, we argue that a political system’s success in generating fiscal stability will depend on historical and cultural contexts. We will show the importance of political culture by drawing on evidence from a research project that compares identity formation through taxes in the USA and in Germany.
