Class, Context and Culture. Explaining Attitudes to Taxes Among Natives and Migrants in Three European Countries.

The literature on attitudes to taxes has focused on two overall types of explanations: class and context. While the first type of explanation highlights the impact of socioeconomic factors on attitudes, the latter emphasize the impact of factors such as perceived corruption and trust. This article contends that culture might be a third type of explanation. Using single country studies, which have been the basis for much of the literature on tax attitudes, this effect would be impossible to detect, as the culture would be presumed to be more or less uniform. Even in comparative survey studies culture would be difficult to detect, as lower taxes tend to go in hand with a lower trust in the government and other people. Studies of migrants, however, provides a valuable insight into this, as they show what happens when a large group of people with varying backgrounds come into contact with a new country having a different culture and different institutions. This idea is tested using data from the “Migrant’s Attitudes to Welfare” (MIFARE) survey of ten migrant groups and natives in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. Culture is measured by comparing attitudes to taxation in the origin country using an identical question from the ISSP. The results show that for taxes on high incomes class and culture explains very little of the gap in attitudes between migrants and natives, while culture explains the rest.