Voters, Parties and Policy: The Political Economy of Taxation in the UK

Taxation is back in political economy. Yet, one of the gaps of this rapidly growing research program is the unsystematic treatment of tax preferences. How should tax issues be conceptualized and measured? What are the determinants of attitudes towards taxation? Is there any systematic link between tax preferences and policy? This paper provides a fresh perspective into these questions by revisiting the political economy of taxation in the UK in the past decades. Our mixed-methods strategy builds on three blocks. Firstly, we apply public-mood methodology to construct a new aggregate measure of tax preferences. Secondly, we account for some of the empirical drivers and effects of ‘tax mood’. Thirdly, we develop a qualitative narrative of the nuanced interactions between public opinion, party competition and tax strategies. Although this piece focus on the British case, our agenda is comparative. Our ultimate aim is to present an analytical and measurement framework which might be extended to other relevant cases, in both developed and developing countries.