Taxation as Patronage Politics? The Impact of Ruling Elites' Ethnicity on Tax Demands and Tax Compliance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Even though it is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their own ethnic group, few studies have explored the ways in which the other side of the quid-pro-quo of public goods provision – that is, taxation – is part of this neo-patrimonial logic. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of taxation as a basis for patronage politics. Using self-reported data on ethnic identity and taxation issues from the Afrobarometer survey, the paper explores, on the one hand, to what extent the ethnicity of the ruling elite affects the degree to which citizens who identify with different ethnic groups are subject to demands for taxation and, on the other hand, the extent to which a relationship exists between the ethnicity of the ruling elite and the propensity of citizens who identify with different ethnic groups to comply with tax demands. The paper provides important insights to the debate on whether leaders reward co-ethnics with all kinds of patronage, as well as to the literature on fiscal sociology, which has so far been largely absent from the debate on patronage politics.