Mobilisation around International Tax Justice in the UK and Australia after the Global Financial Crisis

International tax justice issues, such as closing corporate tax havens, have gained particular salience over the past decade in an environment of financial instability and government austerity. Civil society involvement has ranged from trade unions and NGOs calling for parliamentary inquiries to civil disobedience by less established actors. Since the Global Financial Crisis, how have levels of contentious collective action around these issues waxed and waned? Are economic conditions associated most strongly with increases in contentiousness, or are media events like the release of the Panama Papers? This paper uses an original hand-coded dataset from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2017. A political claims analysis (PCA) approach will collect all instances of political claims around international tax justice and enable comparison of the key civil society actors, the types of actions they select, and the different frames they use (Koopmans and Statham 1999). The paper will argue that economic conditions which vary between the two countries are a significant factor, as well as media events which are common to both, producing distinct levels of mobilisation, strategic actions, and framing choices. Koopmans, R. & Statham, P. (1999). “Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches.” Mobilization 4 (2): 203-221.