How Economic Elites Shape Public Tax Debates

Although only a minority of individuals are financially burdened by taxes on the rich, their (moral) necessity, distributive effectiveness, technical feasibility, and economic consequences remain highly contested. This skepticism is mirrored in public tax debates, where economic elites – entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, business associations, and think tanks – assess these policies alongside politicians. While behind-the-scenes lobbying by economic elites has received considerable scholarly attention, we know comparatively little about how they contribute to the public information environment. In this paper, I examine how economic elites shape the politics of taxing the rich through media appearances. Understanding this public role is crucial, as existing research shows that individuals often possess limited knowledge of tax policies and are susceptible to different policy frames. I theorize that the same structural, financial, and informational resources that underpin economic elites’ influence in low-salience quiet politics also secure their authority in high-salience noisy politics. Yet, I argue that public visibility necessitates strategic adaptation. Economic elites are expected to rely on public interest frames – structural, technical, and moral arguments – to broaden their appeal and resonate with wider publics. I further propose that the frame choice reflects the resource profiles of economic elites: corporate leaders emphasize structural consequences, think tanks foreground technical assessments, entrepreneurs advance moral objections, and business associations combine these frames to represent heterogeneous members. Empirically, I analyze media discourse on taxing the rich in Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom from the 1990s to the present. After identifying relevant newspaper articles using a multilingual dictionary, I detect policy claims with a fine-tuned transformer model, and rely on a small language model to extract speaker–statement pairs and classify each claim by actor, stance, and frame. Across the three countries, this process yields a cross-national claim-level dataset of around 25,000 articles and 90,000 claims, capturing who intervenes in public tax debates, the positions they advance, and the ideational strategies they deploy. The paper makes both theoretical and methodological contributions. Theoretically, it shows that the politics of taxing the rich involve contests over public meaning, in which economic elites translate their economic power into ideational influence. Methodologically, it develops a scalable approach for detecting and classifying policy claims, offering a generalizable framework for studying ideational power in public policy discourse.