A number of recent studies have investigated the relationship between political regimes and tax collection. Notably, the main focus of these studies has been to contrast democracy and dictatorship with one another (Boix 2003; Cheibub 1998; Timmon 2010, Olson 1993). Given that democracy is seen as universally desirable, and tax-collection is one of the most important issues facing developing countries today, this is highly understandable. However, by comparing democracies and autocracies with one another, we run the risk of ignoring differences within these groups. This paper aims to fill that gap, by looking exclusively at the group of non-democracies. Taking the quote by Geddes (1999, p. 121) – that “different kinds of authoritarianism differ from each other as much as they differ from democracy” seriously – it investigates why some dictatorships collect more taxes than others.
In this, it follows other recent studies which have gone beyond dichotomous democracy-dictatorship comparisons. For example, research by Garcia and von Haldenwang (2016) show that the character of the polity does affect taxation, but that the effect is not linear. Rather, they present a U-shaped relationship, were “hard dictatorships” on average collect as much money in taxes as full democracies. Instead, the worst performers are countries that fall somewhere in between, the so called “hybrid” or “anocratic” regimes. Utilizing panel-data for 105 countries for the period 1960-2010, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of why some non-democratic regimes manages to generate substantial tax revenue, while others fail to do so. In so doing, it draws on literature that highlights the different ways in which autocratic regimes legitimize their rule (Gerschewski 2018; von Soest & Grauvogel 2017), the size of different regimes support groups (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003) and the varying degrees of elite cohesion (Geddes et al. 2014; Svolik 2012).
