Taxing by Consent? Evolution and Effects of Tax Mood in the United Kingdom (1975-2025)

Taxation has become a highly contested political issue in the UK. Debates around taxes dominate media representations and are pivotal to parties’ electoral strategies. Budget speeches have become the focal point of the political calendar. What’s striking though is the lack of attention given to the evolution and effects of public attitudes towards taxes. Despite some good efforts (Barnes, 2015), the focus on tax preferences is still relatively peripheral in political economy. This paper fills this gap by documenting the trajectory and assessing the effects of tax preferences in Britain over the past five decades. Specifically, we engage two core questions: 1) what have been the evolution and drivers of tax preferences in the period 1975-2025? and 2) how have those preferences actually shaped tax policy? A key building block of this project is our estimation of tax mood. This is our best effort to represent the level of tolerance and/or resistance to taxes by the British public. To do so, we apply IRT techniques (McGann, 2014) to leverage hundreds of surveys (by public and private sources) on tax-and-spend issues. We also introduce a comparative angle by looking at the intersections between attitudes towards taxes and other core components of economic policy mood, particularly preferences towards redistribution and welfare. Our paper is divided into four sections. In the first, we discuss the ‘tax gap’ in national and international surveys and the relative neglect of public-opinion in the political economy of tax. We then build on fiscal sociology to underline the critical role of consent – or the lack of it - in the study of taxation. In the second section, we address measurement issues, present our methods and data sources, and represent our tax-mood estimation. In the third section, we build a set of ECMs to assess the actual relationship between tax mood and tax policy. In the fourth section, we offer more nuance by developing narratives of critical moments in contemporary British tax story. The idea is to go deeper into how a given tax sentiment is actually translated into party strategies and budget decisions. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of our work and framing our next research steps. In particular, we propose two potential innovations, one analytical, one comparative. Analytically, the idea is to integrate systematic measures of ‘tax narratives’ into our macro polity models. On the comparative side, we will replicate our approach to other cases such as Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the US. Overall, the contributions of our paper are twofold. Firstly, we want to build on and contribute towards the recent generation of work on the politics of taxation (Kiser & Karceski, 2017; Steinmo, 2018; Genschel & Seelkopf, 2022). Secondly, we wish to promote a comparative agenda on the public-opinion side of taxes. More specifically, this is an attempt to build bridges between the traditional concerns of fiscal sociology and the modern analytical/methodological tools of macro-polity models.