Detecting justifications in political speech on wealth taxation

Wealth inequality has been increasing worldwide since the 1980s, sparking considerable debate on wealth taxation among scholars, politicians, and the general public. What is striking, is that this does not result in more progressive taxation, but rather the opposite, with countries increasingly abolishing their wealth taxes. To better understand the apparent paradox of rising inequality yet declining progressiveness of wealth taxation, we turn to the Belgian parliament and its debates on wealth taxation between 1870 and today. Little attention has been paid to how political actors discursively discuss wealth taxation over time. This paper addresses this gap by pursuing two main aims. First, we examine how discursive ideas about wealth taxation have changed over time across political parties and ideological blocs in Belgium. We therefore analyze plenary parliamentary debates using a mixed-methods approach that combines automated text analysis and data enrichment with Large Language Models (LLMs) with more traditional qualitative approaches including close reading and contextual interpretation. Second, we analyze to what extent these parliamentary debates reflect a broader public opinion in society by examining historical newspaper data. Our analytical framework is based on discursive institutionalism, which emphasizes how ideas are strategically used to justify of oppose policies. Ideas and discourse can actively shape the political space in which certain tax reforms become legitimate. We interpret these discursive shifts in relation to broader socio-economic contexts, with particular attention to crisis moments – such as economic recessions and wars – as they can change arguments and provide a window of opportunity for policy changes in taxation. Belgium is an interesting case study as it has only once implemented a one-off net wealth tax, introduced after the Second World War. The country’s historically pronounced pillarization makes it relatively straightforward to distinguish ideological blocs. While pillarization has weakened, its legacy continues to shape the ideological landscape. This makes Belgium a useful case for analyzing discursive patterns on wealth taxation of ideological blocs over time.