Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
DO VISIBLE TAXES CAUSE PROTEST? TAX POLICY AND TAX PROTEST IN RICH DEMOCRACIES Paper prepared for the meetings of RC-19 Isaac Martin and Nadav Gabay September 7, 2007 Department of Sociology University of California - San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0533 [email protected] [email protected] “The art of taxation,” according to an oft-repeated maxim, “consists of plucking the goose so as to obtain the most feathers with the least squawking”—i.e., maximizing revenue while minimizing protest.1 But the science of taxation offers little help in minimizing protest. Scholars of public finance have been more concerned with minimizing efficiency costs. To that end they have investigated how individuals respond to taxes by altering their investment behavior, their consumption patterns, or their labor market participation (Auerbach and Hines 2002; Slemrod and Yitzhaki 2002), but they have rarely asked how individuals respond to taxes by demanding changes in tax policy. Social movement scholars, for their part, have explored how protest responds to mobilizing structures (McCarthy and Zald 1977), political opportunities (McAdam 1996; Meyer 2004), and the framing efforts of social movement organizations (Benford and Snow 2000), but have devoted little explicit theoretical attention to the question of which public policies provoke protest and why (Meyer 2005). Social scientists know a great deal about how to tax without increasing unemployment or provoking capital flight, but comparatively little about how to tax without provoking public outcry. Why do some policies provoke more protest than others? In the absence of systematic research, policy makers and economists alike have leaned on the folk theory that some policies are more protest-prone than others because their burdens are inherently more noticeable or “visible.” We call this folk theory the visibility hypothesis. It was a conventional wisdom among English politicians in the early eighteenth century that some taxes were more visible than others (Barker 1966), and it became a staple of classical political economy (McCulloch 1975 [1845]; Mill 2004 [1871]; Puviani 1973 [1903]) and political sociology (Michels 1968 [1915]; Pareto 1963 [1916]). Some political scientists and sociologists have recently resurrected the visibility hypothesis to help explain the political durability of large welfare states. They survive, the argument goes, because they rely on taxes that are “invisible” and that therefore generate little backlash (Kato 2003; Morgan and Campbell 2005; Prasad 2005; Prasad 2006; Steinmo 1993; Wilensky 2002). In this paper we subject this folk wisdom to theoretical interrogation and empirical test. Previous attempts to test the visibility hypothesis have relied on vaguely specified mechanisms and uninformative research designs. We draw on social movement theory and recent research in behavioral public finance to distinguish among the cognitive properties of policies that may provoke protest. We apply this theory to tax policy, employing a novel design that permits systematic comparisons over time and across taxes. And we draw on a new comparative database that provides explicit, time-varying measures of visibility and protest for six categories of taxation in sixteen rich, democratic countries over a 35-year period. The results include some surprises. Sales taxes and value-added taxes (VAT)—widely believed by welfare state scholars to be the least visible taxes (Wilensky 2002; Kato 2003; Prasad 2005, 2006)—are in fact the most often protested, in part because they are among the most burdensome. Taxes on payroll, by contrast, are the least often protested, and other taxes are intermediate. The pattern can be explained by two factors: the magnitude of the tax burden, and the ease with which that burden can be traced to the actions of policy makers. Another dimension of visibility—the ease of calculating the burden—appears to have no independent impact on protest. “L'art de l'imposition consiste à plumer l'oie pour obtenir le plus possible de plumes avant d'obtenir le moins possible de cris.” Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to Louis XIV. http://www.dicocitations.com/auteur/1073/Colbert_Jean_Baptiste.php, retrieved August 3, 2007. 1 2 These findings have important implications for social movement theory and welfare state research. Social movement scholars have begun to recognize that the threat of adverse conditions can motivate protest. We show that the design of public policy may affect protest not only not only by creating threats, but also by influencing which adverse conditions are framed as threats. Diagnostic framing of policy threats depends not only on the competing rhetorical strategies of protesters and their opponents, but also on the flow of information that is structured by public policy. For welfare state research, our finding suggests that a common explanation for the resilience of big welfare states is wrong. Scholars have observed that large welfare states rely heavily on consumption taxes, most especially VAT (Ganghof 2006; Lindert 2004; Prasad 2005; Prasad 2006). Two explanations have been put forward to explain this correlation. One is that that VAT falls on mostly on labor, and thereby allows states to build expensive welfare commitments without driving away mobile capital. The second is that VAT is invisible and therefore allows states to build expensive welfare states without provoking taxpayer protest. Our findings show that the second of these explanations rests on a mistaken premise. Finally and most generally, we think this project demonstrates the potential contribution of empirical sociology to the science of public finance. If the art of taxation consists of minimizing protest, then scholars and practitioners of taxation could benefit from engagement with social movement scholars. The depth of collective ignorance about the causes of tax protest is illustrated by the short-lived British poll tax: this flat-rate, per-capita (or “lump-sum”) tax was consistent with the best wisdom of mainstream public finance scholarship on how to minimize efficiency costs (see, e.g., Auerbach and Hines 2002; Cordes 2005), but its introduction to England and Wales in 1990 led to weeks of civil disobedience, demonstrations, and rioting, culminating in a day-long rebellion that paralyzed London, brought down a prime minister, and reportedly harmed Britain’s image abroad (Burns 1992; Butler, Adonis, and Travers 1994). The poll tax riots no doubt had considerable efficiency costs as well. Public finance scholarship that wishes to be realistic about the behavioral consequences of public policy might benefit from incorporating sociological theory. VISIBILITY, TRACEABILITY, AND POLICY-ORIENTED PROTEST Tax protest is a special case of a general phenomenon that we may call policy-oriented protest. Social movement challengers often demand changes in public policy. But what is it about particular public policies that provokes protest? Our theory of policy-oriented protest builds on the standard political process model of social movements (McAdam 1982; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 1978). According to the classic version of this model, potential protesters will protest if and only if they expect the benefits of protest to exceed the costs. Expanding political opportunities create incentives for protest, on this assumption, by increasing the expected likelihood that protest will pay off (Amenta and Zylan 1991; Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003; McAdam 1982; McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1996). Adverse conditions (or “threats”) can also create incentives for protest by increasing the costs of inaction (Almeida 2003; Einwohner 2003; Goldstone and Tilly 2001; Tilly 1978; Van Dyke and Soule 2002). A tax increase is one example of a “policy threat” (Campbell 2005a) that may make protest more attractive by increasing the shared costs of doing nothing. Public policy may also affect protest by shaping the perception of threats, independently of their magnitude. Social movement scholars have argued persuasively that the perception and 3 attribution of opportunities and threats is mediated by “master frames” and other cultural resources available to potential protesters (Benford 1997; Benford and Snow 2000; Gamson and Meyer 1996; Goodwin and Jasper 1999; Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). Much early work on framing had a voluntaristic cast, and seemed to suggest that activists need only come up with the right rhetorical strategy in order to mobilize a mass movement (for sympathetic criticism along these lines, see Benford 1997; Polletta 1997). Recent scholarship has moved away from this voluntarism by focusing on the discursive structure of opportunities. Law and public policy provide prime examples of discursive resources that constrain the rhetorical options available to protesters (Ferree 2003; Pedriana 2006). We share this renewed emphasis on policy as a cultural resource for protesters, but our own approach emphasizes the performative dimension of policy rather than its semantic content. Policy does things, and the things it does may make certain ways of framing grievances possible or desirable. Visibility in the dominant literaure on taxation is a metaphor rather than an analytic concept. In order to give it analytic content, we distinguish between two senses in which a policy might be said to be visible: its salience and its traceability. Following Chetty et al. (2007), we say that a policy is salient if it provides perceptual cues that make it easy for people to compute its costs at the time that they are incurred. Salience does not refer only to literal visual evidence, although visual cues are among the things that may make it easier to calculate costs. Salience matters because potential protesters must perceive the costs of the policy in order to perceive that policy as a threat. A taxpayer who underestimates the magnitude of her tax burden, e.g., may perceive little benefit in demonstrating for a lower tax rate. Perceiving the cost of a policy is a nontrivial barrier to protest because it typically requires substantial cognitive effort. Research in behavioral economics demonstrates that people take cognitive shortcuts in order to reduce the effort of economic calculation, and these heuristics may induce a variety of systematic biases (for reviews see Camerer 1995; Fang and Silverman 2006; Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002). A substantial body of scholarship in public choice and behavioral public finance suggests that public officials may design policies to exploit these biases and obscure the costs of unpopular public policy (Dollery and Worthington 1996; see, e.g., Frey and Stutzer 2006; Gemmell, Morrissey, and Pinar 2002; Loewenstein, Small, and Strnad 2006; McCaffery and Baron 2005; McCaffery and Baron 2006; McCaffery 1994; McCaffery and Baron 2004; Oates 1988; Wagner 1976; Winter and Mouritzen 2001). The classic source for this claim is Puviani’s Theory of Fiscal Illusions (1970 [1903]), which argued that rulers prevent armed tax rebellions by deliberately inducing “optimistic illusions” that conceal the full cost of taxation. Following Pierson (1993), we say that a policy is traceable if it provides information that facilitates causal attribution of its costs to the actions of policy makers. Causal attribution matters for collective action because it affects what people expect they can achieve by protest. Potential protesters will demand that policy makers do something about their grievances only if they think that policy makers can do something—that is, if they think that their grievances depend causally on the choices of policy makers (Benford and Snow 2000; Javeline 2003; Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). In the case of tax policy, traceability is partly a function of how the tax is collected. A tax that is collected directly by agents of the state is likely to be more traceable than a tax that is collected indirectly through intermediaries. Conversely, a tax policy may be untraceable if tax collection is bundled together with other economic transactions.2 2 The distinction between visibility and traceability is potentially important because perception and causal attribution are independent cognitive tasks. To illustrate the difference, imagine a new excise tax on fuel that is passed on to automobile drivers in the price of gasoline. A driver might attribute the increase in the cost of fuel to tax policy 4 Salience and traceability may vary independently of one another. They may even vary inversely. Consider the case of a sales or excise tax that is collected from merchants and passed along to consumers in the prices of goods. Recent field experiments demonstrate that shoppers respond to the cost of a retail sales tax most readily when stores include the tax in the posted prices of goods (Chetty et al. 2007). Price inclusion increases the salience of the tax and thereby increases the tax elasticity of demand. But tax-inclusive prices, although they reveal the cost of a tax, may obscure the fact that this cost is due to public policy. For this reason, scholars from John Stuart Mill onward have more typically assumed that price inclusion actually reduces visibility and protects consumption taxes from protest (Kato 2003; Mack, Breaux, Frenzel, Garrett, Lazear, Muris, Poterba, Rossotti, and Sonders 2005; Mill 2004 [1871]). In the case of price inclusion, salience and traceability suggest opposite hypotheses: H1. Price inclusion increases salience: consumption taxes that are included in posted prices are more likely to cause protest than consumption taxes that are not. H2. Price inclusion decreases traceability: consumption taxes that are not included in posted prices are more likely to cause protest than consumption taxes that are included. Another example comes from the taxation of income. Some tax authorities, like the U. S. Internal Revenue Service, require taxpayers to compute their own income tax liability, a practice called self-assessment. Other tax authorities do the computation themselves and notify taxpayers of their liability, a practice called administrative assessment. Administrative assessment eases the cognitive burden of computing the tax liability and thereby increases the visibility of the tax. Edlund (1992), e.g., presents evidence that Swedes are better informed about the distribution of personal income tax than Americans are, and suggests that the prevalence of fiscal illusions in the U.S. may be attributable to the greater cognitive difficulty of American income tax assessment. But if administrative assessment increases visibility it may decrease traceability. Self-assessment ritually that marks the distinction between pre-tax and after-tax income. This ritual may in fact make people aware that their incomes causally depend on tax policy. For this reason, some conservative commentators have argued that the ritual of self-assessment is necessary to fully informed, democratic self-government (Christian and Robbins 2005) H3. Administrative assessment increases salience: Taxes that are administratively assessed are more likely to cause protest than taxes that are self-assessed. H4. Self-assessment increases traceability: Taxes that are self-assessed are more likely to cause protest than taxes that are administratively assessed. Finally, consider the policy of withholding tax at the source. A tax on earnings is withheld at source if it is remitted to the state by the employer, without ever passing through the hands of the legally liable taxpayer. Withholding, much like inclusion of sales tax in posted prices, eases the cognitive burden of economic decision-making. Taxpayers whose tax is withheld from their earnings may find it easier to calculate the after-tax results of their economic choices. Withholding also presents taxpayers with frequent visual evidence of the tax liability: wage earners, e.g., have visual evidence of their taxes on every paycheck stub (see e.g. Prasad 2006). Some economists have argued therefore that such taxes “deducted explicitly from earnings” are relatively visible (Becker and Mulligan 2003: 304; see also Mack et al. 2005: 204). while underestimating its magnitude. Conversely, another driver might perceive the increase in the cost of fuel correctly but misattribute the increase to inevitable natural scarcity. The second driver might be more likely than the first to change her consumption behavior in response to the tax—e.g. by driving less. But neither driver is likely to protest the fuel tax. Collective action requires both perception of the threat and its causal attribution to policy makers. 5 If salience is what makes some tax policies protest-prone, then we might expect withholding to increase the likelihood of protest. But many tax experts have assumed that withholding decreases the likelihood of tax protest by obscuring the causal relationship between tax and income (Finkelstein 2007; Loewenstein, Small, and Strnad 2006; Twight 1995; Zelenak 2003). Zelenak (2003) puts the point as follows: “For an employee whose income is subject to withholding, pretax income is just a number on a pay stub; it lacks the visceral reality of take-home pay” (2003: 2271). The causal connection between the tax liability and the actions of policy makers might be more viscerally felt—i.e., more traceable—if the taxpayer had to participate directly in the interaction ritual of handing the tax over to an agent of the government. H5. Withholding increases salience: Taxes on earnings that are withheld at source are more likely to cause protest than taxes that wage earners must remit directly to the state. H6. Withholding decreases traceability: Taxes on earnings that are collected by withholding at the source are less likely to cause protest than taxes that wage earners must remit directly to the state. MEASUREMENT PROBLEMS IN PRIOR RESEARCH Scholars have long assumed that visibility causes protest. Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Britain, is supposed to have remarked in the early eighteenth century that “the payers of direct taxes... were pigs that squealed if they were touched; [while] the payers of indirect taxes were only sheep that let themselves be sheared in silence” (Barker 1966: 57), and John Stuart Mill theorized that the so-called indirect taxes (chiefly customs and excises) were immune to protest because they were collected by intermediaries and included in prices (Mill 2004 [1871]: 223). But prior attempts to test the visibility hypothesis have been hampered by two serious methodological shortcomings. The first is the problem of ecological inference. Most contemporary proponents of tax salience hypothesis in sociology and political science today cite the research of Wilensky (Wilensky 1976; Wilensky 2002), who compared national tax systems in the aggregate, rather than individual taxes. Wilensky and his research assistants assigned each of nineteen democracies a score to represent the aggregate level of “tax-welfare backlash” over the period 1965 to 1975, and demonstrated that countries that relied most heavily on taxes that he classified as “direct taxes” also experienced the most backlash (see also Hibbs and Madsen 1981). It is but a short leap from this finding to the conclusion that direct taxes cause protest, but that leap entails an invalid ecological inference. Countries that rely heavily on direct taxes might exhibit the most protest, but protesters within these countries might still be protesting primarily against indirect taxes. The case of Danish tax protest illustrates the problem. This country is well known to students of comparative political economy for its uniquely heavy reliance on income taxes (Ganghof 2007), and it is also thought by many scholars to be the country that “has experienced the most extensive tax revolts (i.e., resistance to high-tax burden) in Western Europe” (Kato 2003: 30; see also Esping-Andersen 1985; Østergård 1992). Many scholars have offered the Danish case as evidence that income taxes cause protest, and Wilensky’s studies of tax-welfare backlash in the period 1965 to 1975 devote considerable attention to Danish anti-income-tax protest (see Wilensky 2002: 377). But the historical record suggests that at least as many Danes protested against consumption taxes in that decade. In 1965, e.g., a group of Copenhagen 6 shopkeepers founded a “Sales Tax Collectors’ Association” to lobby for lower taxes, and two years later they founded a protest party called the Citizens’ Party for the same purpose.3 In February 1973, a new grassroots organization called the People’s Consumer Committee collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to demand a permanent ban on taxation of grocery sales (Avisårbogen 1973). And a proposed increase in the VAT provoked the largest single tax protest in Denmark in the postwar era—a 200,000 person strike in May 1974 (New York Times 1974). The lesson of the Danish case is that cross-national comparisons alone cannot tell us which taxes are most likely to cause protest. For that purpose, we need systematic comparisons across taxes within a given country. The second problem with the existing literature is its lack of explicit, empirical indicators of salience and traceability. The theoretical literature implies that the visibility of a tax depends on the details of how a tax is assessed and collected. John Stuart Mill’s hypothesis that indirect taxes were immune to protest, e.g., depended on the assumption that such taxes were included in prices. But most empirical studies to date have classified taxes according to the tax base (e.g. whether they are levied on income or consumption) rather than the mode of collection (e.g. whether they are included in prices, or whether they are withheld at source). The result is that the empirical studies do not shed any light on the question of whether it is really visibility, as opposed to some other characteristic of the tax, that matters for political behavior. This problem pervades even studies that avoid the ecological fallacy. Most notably, there are a handful of within-country studies that compare the political effects of income taxes and consumption taxes. These studies generally suggest that consumption taxes, not income taxes, are the most cognitively salient taxes (Dornstein 1987; Gemmell, Morrissey, and Pinar 2003), the most likely to provoke anti-government attitudes (Gemmell, Morrissey, and Pinar 2003), and the most likely to provoke anti-incumbent voting (Hansen 1983; Landon and Ryan 1997; Stults and Winters 2005). But these studies shed little light on why consumption taxes provoke a greater political response. Simply comparing an income tax to a consumption tax does not tell us what it is about the latter that is more conducive to backlash. These considerations suggest that a test of the visibililty hypothesis should (a) compare taxes within a country and (b) measure directly those features of tax policy that are hypothesized to affect the traceability and salience of the policy. METHODS: THE COMPARATIVE TAX PROTEST DATABASE We apply these lessons to our analysis of the Comparative Tax Protest Database, a new time-series cross-section data set of tax protest events in sixteen rich democratic countries4 over the period from 1966 to 2000. The database includes a series of codes describing every episode of collective action directed at least partly against taxation in these countries that we could discover in a full-text search of two news sources of record. We defined tax protest for the purposes of this data set as nongovernmental collective action in protest against existing or proposed taxes. Appendix A describes in detail how we operationalized this definition. "Omsopkræverforbundet i Danmark," n.d., Box 545; "Borgerpartiet" flyer, n.d., Box 545; "BORGERPARTIET: partiet for økonomisk frihed," n.d., Box 545; and "Se godt efter Borgerpartiets løsgængere," n.d., Box 545, Fremskridtspartiets Arbejdsarkiv, Privatarkiv nr. 11008, Rigsarkiv, Copenhagen, Denmark. 4 Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America. 3 7 This database represents a substantial advance over the impressionistic generalizations about patterns of protest that appear in the recent comparative welfare states literature (e.g. Kato 2003; Prasad 2005). Newspaper data represent the best available source of systematic data on tax protest, as with many other forms of protest (Earl, Martin, McCarthy, and Soule 2004). Nevertheless, newspaper coverage of protest events is subject to well-known selection biases (Koopmans and Rucht 2002; McAdam and Su 2002; Oliver and Maney 2000; Oliver and Myers 1999; Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz 2005). We designed our study to minimize these biases to the extent possible. First, we relied on multiple sources. Our primary source was the New York Times, which a recent critical review of protest event research describes as “the best single newspaper source for political event data” (Ortiz et al. 2005: 402). We supplemented this source with Keesing’s Record of World Events, a standard international news source for constructing quantitative time series of political events (see, e.g., Belkin and Schofer 2003; Gasiorowski 1995; Gurr 1993). Second, in searching the Times we used the combination of “generic event descriptor” and “event-specific” search strategies recommended by Maney and Oliver to maximize validity (Maney and Oliver 2001). Finally, we tested the sensitivity of our results to various measurement decisions and to the inclusion of explicit controls for media selection bias. We report the results of these sensitivity tests below. The Comparative Tax Protest Database makes two novel contributions. First, it incorporates information about variation in tax protest over time (cf. Wilensky 2002). Timevarying data are crucial to assess the causal hypothesis that reliance on particular taxes causes protest and not vice versa. Second, the database includes information about which particular taxes were the objects of protest. It thus permits a direct test of the hypothesis that some taxes are more vulnerable to protest than others. We coded at least one demand, and sometimes multiple demands, for each protest event in the database. We classified taxes according to the four-digit hierarchical classification scheme of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is the standard for cross-national comparison of tax revenues (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development 2003). The level of precision with which we could identify the tax or taxes at issue varied considerably across protest events. For the purposes of the statistical analysis presented here, we aggregated all codes to the most general level, which allowed us to distinguish six categories: income taxes (1000), social security contributions (2000), other payroll taxes (3000), taxes on property (4000), taxes on goods and services (5000), and all other taxes (6000). Although we would prefer to draw finer distinctions, the six-category classification is more than adequate to provide a direct test of the visibility hypothesis, and provides much finer resolution than any previously available comparative data. For the purposes of the present analysis, we treat the presence of a protest demand as a dichotomous variable: was there any reported protest against a particular tax in a particular country and year, or not? We call this dependent variable a “demand” in order distinguish it from a protest event. The conceptual distinction is important for two reasons. First, protesters might make multiple demands in the course of a single protest. For example, 10,000 French shopkeepers marched through Paris in 1983 to protest an austerity plan that would raise income taxes, social security contributions, and government fees; we coded this protest as three demands because it concerned three different categories of tax policy. Second, multiple protest events in the same country and year might express the same demand. The most dramatic example in our database is the Mouvement de La Tour-du-Pin, a French shopkeepers’ movement for lower social security taxes that involved at least seven protest events in 1969 alone, including demonstrations, 8 marches, and violent clashes with police. For the purposes of the present analysis, these events are treated as a single demand (protest against social security taxes in France in 1969). Treating the presence of a protest demand as a dichotomous variable provides sufficient resolution to test the visibility hypothesis while avoiding the risk of spurious precision associated with attempts to measure participation from newspaper reports. It is safe to assume, however, that protests reported in the Times met a high threshhold of participation.5 We test the relationship between tax institutions and tax protest with a series of logistic regression models estimated over a subset of the data that includes six categories of taxation in each of 16 countries over a period of 35 years (1966 to 2000) for which data on covariates are readily available. Like other applications of logistic regression to events data, these models may be understood as discrete-time event history models (Beck forthcoming 2007; Petersen 1995). Because of the multilevel data structure—spells nested within taxes nested within countries—all of our models include random country-level intercepts, as well as both fixed and time-varying covariates measured at the levels of the country-tax and the country-tax-year. Our full models have the form: log (Pijt/[1-Pijt]) = α + βijtXijt + γijWij + δitVit + εi where P is the probability of a protest demand; i indexes country, j indexes tax, and t indexes year; X is a vector of country-tax-year specific variables; W is a vector of temporally invariant country-tax specific variables, including many of the institutional characteristics of interest; V is a vector of country-year specific variables; and ε is a random, country-level intercept.6 Some of our models also include a vector of year-specific dummy variables Ut on the right-hand side. Independent variables We measure the burden of a given tax as the tax ratio, or the revenues from the tax standardized as a percentage of GDP, following a common practice in the comparative political economy of taxation (Campbell 2005b; Kiser and Lang 2001; Slemrod 2004; Swank and Steinmo 2002). We capture the institutional features of taxation with a series of three dummy variables. The first is for taxes on income that are self-assessed.7 The second dummy variable represents taxes on income, earnings or payroll that are withheld at source. We code a tax as withheld at source only if tax on earnings is withheld from paychecks. Our data on the institutional arrangements for income tax assessment and collection come from OECD 5 The 57 demands analyzed in this paper represent 67 unique events, many of which duplicated demands made by other protests in the same year, and many of which also made demands concerning multiple taxes. Of these 67 protest events, numerical estimates of participation were available for 53, or 79%. Where a range of estimates was reported, we coded the low estimate. Where a nationwide general strike was reported without a numerical estimate, we inferred an estimate based on Visser’s data on union membership. Among these 53 protest events, the minimum participation was “more than 100,” and the median was 30,000. In some countries, notably Italy and France, the Times recorded several general strikes against the government’s tax policy that involved millions of participants. 6 We conducted a Hausman test of the country-level random-effects estimator against a fixed-effects estimator with country-level intercepts for our full model (Model 4). The test failed to reject the null hypothesis that country-level effects were uncorrelated with the measured covariates; thus, the more efficient random-effects estimator is preferred. 7 We code a tax as self-assessed only if the majority of wage-earners are required to calculate their income tax liability; thus, Britain receives a code of 0 despite recent moves toward partial self-assessment for high-income taxpayers. 9 publications on tax administration (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development 1990; Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development 2006), supplemented by data on the timing of major income tax reforms from European Taxation magazine (1965-2000), Income Taxes outside the United Kingdom (Great Britain. Board of Inland Revenue 1966-1983) and Tax Systems of the World (New York State Tax Commission and Commerce Clearing House 1940-1952). The third dummy variable represents taxes on goods and services that are price-inclusive, i.e., included in retail prices. We assigned the code for price inclusion based on the main sales or value-added tax in a country. Following Kato (2003), we code a VAT as price-inclusive if it was enacted before 1980. We also code manufacturing and wholesale sales taxes (as opposed to retail sales taxes) as price-inclusive. Our data on the type of sales tax and the date of adopting VAT come from Kato (2003). We include a variety of controls for time-varying elements of the political opportunity structure. Social movement scholars commonly argue that the presence of partisan allies or enemies in government affects the likelihood of protest (McAdam 1982; McAdam 1996; McAdam and Su 2002; Meyer 2004; Nam 2007; Soule, McAdam, McCarthy, and Su 1999; Tarrow 1996; Tarrow 1998; Van Dyke 2003). We therefore include a variable for left party share of the cabinet. We include a separate variable for left party share of the legislature, in keeping with recent scholarship that demonstrates independent (and sometimes opposing) effects of partisan allies or rivals in the executive and legislative branches (Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003; Van Dyke 2003). We are agnostic about the direction of the expected relationships: potential tax protesters may perceive left governments as allies or as enemies, and either threat or opportunity effects may predominate. We also include a dichotomous variable equal to one in an election year, since scholars have argued that disruptive protest may be an especially effective and therefore especially inviting strategy when parties face electoral competition (Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003; McAdam 1982; Piven and Cloward 1979). Other characteristics of the political opportunity structure commonly emphasized in cross-national studies—such as the formal distribution of voting rights, the availability of institutional access points, and the centralization of bureaucratic authority (Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni 1995; Tarrow 1996)—are temporally invariant in the sample analyzed here. Our randomeffects modeling strategy controls for these static dimensions of opportunity structure, although it does not allow us to measure their independent effects. We also include control variables that have been found to be significant in prior quantitative studies of tax-welfare backlash. The first is real GDP per capita, in 1996 US dollars. Wilensky (2002) reports that tax protest is common in less developed economies (see also Ardant 1965). The second is social security transfer expenditures standardized as a percentage of GDP. Many scholars have argued that tax protest is, in part, a backlash against the growth of social spending (Rosenberry 1982; Wilensky 1976; Wilensky 2002). Descriptive statistics and data sources for all of these independent variables are presented in Table 1. We lag all independent variables and control variables one year to insure proper causal order, with the exception of election years, which are assumed to affect protest in the year that they occur, if at all. We deal with missing values by listwise deletion. WHICH TAXES DO PEOPLE PROTEST, AND WHY? 10 Our database provides the first systematic evidence that taxes do indeed differ in the frequency with which they are targeted for protest. We present the raw frequency distribution of protest events across categories of taxation in Table 2. The table shows that taxes on goods and services were the most common object of protest: almost half of all protest events recorded in our database expressed the demand to cut these taxes. This finding is surprising in light of Wilensky’s (1976, 2002) claim that consumption taxes are the least prone to tax revolts, but—as noted above—it is consistent with other studies of tax perceptions and voting behavior that do not commit an ecological fallacy. In other respects the findings are congruent with Wilensky’s. Income taxes are highly prone to protest. Payroll taxes are comparatively immune. What makes some of these taxes more odious than others? We addressed this question with a series of regressions reported in Table 3. Model 1 includes indicator variables for income and goods and services taxes, since these are the two most likely to provoke protest; Model 2 introduces controls for the magnitude of the tax burden; Model 3 includes indicators of various specific institutional characteristics of taxation; and Model 4 includes a full set of controls for political opportunities, economic development, and social spending. In order to focus attention on robust results, we report and discuss the estimates from a fifteen-country sample that excludes Italy, which a jackknife diagnostic revealed to be an influential outlier. We report the results of the full sixteen-country analysis and the jackknife in Appendix B. Tax policy does indeed affect tax protest. Our principal finding is that the heavier the tax, the more likely it is to become an object of protest. This association is by far the strongest in the data. It lends support to the theory that protest responds to policy threats even more than to political opportunities (Campbell 2003; Miller and Krosnick 2004). To illustrate the magnitude of the association, Table 4 translates the logit coefficients into predicted probabilities of protest under various counterfactual scenarios. We set all control variables equal to their values for an approximately average case (Finland in 1985), and explore the effect of setting tax policy variables at different levels within the range that is historically observed for this tax in this sample. For a self-assessed income tax withheld at source, increasing the tax ratio from the bottom of its range to the top would increase the predicted probability of protest from zero to six percent. For an administratively assessed income tax that is not withheld at source, increasing the tax ratio from the bottom to the top of its historically observed range would increase the predicted probability of protest from 2% to 32%. We also find some evidence that traceability matters. In particular, a tax withheld at source is unlikely to provoke protest. The coefficient for withholding is robust across samples, sharply estimated, and nontrivial. Table 4 shows that in historically plausible scenarios, withholding at source reduces the probability of protest against the income tax by half or more. For example, in the case of an heavy and administratively assessed income tax, withholding reduces the probability of protest from 36% to 11%. By contrast, we do not find support for any of the salience-related hypotheses. Although the coefficient for self-assessment is moderately negative, suggesting a salience effect, this coefficient is neither robust across samples nor statistically significant at conventional levels. Nor does price inclusion appear to have any effect. The coefficient for price inclusion in Model 4 is barely distinguishable from zero, and has little effect on the predicted probability. Together, magnitude and traceability appear to account for at least some and possibly all of the differences in rates of protest across categories of taxation. In Model 1, the coefficients for income tax and goods-and-services tax are both statistically significant and substantial in magnitude. In Model 3, which controls for magnitude and traceability, the coefficients for 11 income and goods-and-services taxes are indistinguishable from zero at conventional levels of significance. In order to test whether the decline in the size and significance of these coefficients was a statistical artifact, we standardized each coefficient for the variance of the underlying latent continuous dependent variable, following Mare (2006: 30n1), and then constructed a standard deviation for the difference in the standardized logit coefficients across models according to the formula suggested by Clogg et al. (Clogg, Petkova, and Haritou 1995). The results indicated that the decreases in these coefficients across models are significant at the p<.05 level. Changing political opportunities appear to have some impact on the emergence of tax protest demands, net of the effects of changing tax policies. Protests are least likely in election years. They are most likely when a left government is in power and when left parties are in the legislative minority. Left governments may be more likely to threaten tax increases, and protesters may anticipate a greater likelihood of blocking tax increases when the governing party is in the minority. Model 4 also implies that tax protest demands became slightly less likely with economic development and with increased social security spending, at least in this sample of countries and years. But neither coefficient is substantively very great. Main findings are not sensitive to media selection bias Are these results sensitive to selection biases in the New York Times’s coverage of protest events? Although we designed our data collection strategy to minimize selection biases to the extent possible, the problems with using newspaper data are potentially severe. We tested the sensitivity of the results in Model 4 to several plausible but unmeasured media selection biases. First, we re-coded the dependent variable to exclude the founding of protest parties and the use of the referendum. Prior studies demonstrate that these conventional forms of protest are an important part of the common protest repertoire in affluent democracies (Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni 1995) and perhaps of the repertoire of tax protest movements in particular (Lo 1990; Wilensky 1976; Wilensky 2002). Nevertheless, newspaper coverage may be assumed to underrepresent these forms of protest insofar as it skews towards large, public, disruptive events (Earl, Martin, McCarthy, and Soule 2004; Maney and Oliver 2001; McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996; Myers and Caniglia 2004; Oliver and Maney 2000; Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz 2005). By narrowing our attention to the most unconventional and disruptive forms of protest, as in Model 5, we reduce the effect of media selection bias on the measurement of our dependent variable. Second, we added year-specific dummy variables to the specification. Students of media bias have argued that coverage of specific issues may vary over time with their salience to the public and the size of the “news hole” (Myers and Caniglia 2004; Oliver and Maney 2000; Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz 2005); the inclusion of year dummies in Model 6 controls for unmeasured fluctuations in these variables, and tests the sensitivity of the results to the assumption of a logistic functional form for the baseline hazard rate (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004). Third, we addressed a probable source of geographic bias by dropping the U.S. from the analysis in Model 7. Newspapers typically have substantial biases towards reporting events that are geographically proximate (Myers and Caniglia 2004; Oliver and Maney 2000; Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz 2005), and the majority of every issue of the New York Times is devoted to reporting on events in the U.S. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that geographic bias might affect 12 our conclusions when the U.S. is included in the sample. Once the U.S. and Italy are both excluded from the sample, self-assessment perfectly predicts the absence of protest, so we exclude the dummy variable for self-assessment from Model 7. Fourth, we attempted to control directly for time-varying, country-specific biases in the attention of the New York Times. Recent research demonstrates that geographic biases in newspaper coverage of protest events may vary substantially over time (Earl, Martin, McCarthy, and Soule 2004; Maney and Oliver 2001; Oliver and Maney 2000; Oliver and Myers 1999; Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz 2005). We therefore controlled for coverage directly by introducing an exogenous variable in Model 8 to represent the total number of articles published in the New York Times in year t in which country j was mentioned by name. Models including this variable offered a particularly conservative test of our hypotheses, because they control not only for differences in the likelihood that an event will be reported, but also for any genuine differences that may exist in the underlying frequencies of newsworthy events. We introduced these adjustments in cumulative fashion, so that Model 8 is an event history model of unconventional protest events outside the U.S., with fixed year effects and explicit controls for New York Times coverage. None of these models weakens our substantive conclusions. The estimated coefficients for the tax ratio and for withholding at source in Models 5 through 8 are comparable in magnitude to the coefficients reported in Model 4. In every model but Model 6, both of these coefficients remain statistically significant at the p<.10 level or better. It is still possible that some systematic media bias affects our estimates of the vulnerability of different taxes to protest demands. To fully explain away the coefficients for tax policy variables estimated in Model 8, however, the hypothesis of selection bias would require all of the following assumptions to be met: that the staff of the New York Times consistently found protest against some categories of tax more newsworthy than protest against other categories of tax; that this bias was geographically and temporally invariant over the fourteen-country sample and the 35-year period analyzed in Model 8; and that the magnitude of this bias was comparable to the strongest systematic biases reported in the extensive empirical literature on protest reporting. Our reading of the literature suggests that these assumptions are implausible. Selective reporting may affect our sample in other ways, but it probably does not bias our conclusions about which taxes are subject to protest and why. CONCLUSION: NOT SALIENCE, BUT MAGNITUDE AND TRACEABILITY How can policy makers pluck the goose with a minimum of squawking? The classic folk wisdom has been that they should rely on indirect taxes because the latter are invisible. We have distinguished two independent ways in which a policy might be said to be visible—its costs might be salient, and they might be traceable to the actions of policy makers. Although recent research in behavioral public finance suggests that it is salience that matters for tax avoidance and consumer choice (Chetty, Looney, and Kroft 2007; Finkelstein 2007)—classic dependent variables of mainstream public finance research—our research suggests that it is traceability that matters more for tax protest. And it is tax protest that is arguably of greater immediate interest to democratically elected officials, for good or ill. The lesson of this study for social movement scholarship is that policy threats matter, but that policy makers can affect perceptions of threat by how they design a policy. Even a manifestly burdensome condition may not provoke protest if its burdens are not easily traced to 13 the actions of policy makers. Our findings also suggest that no extraordinary deception, and perhaps even no active framing effort of any kind, is necessary to conceal policy-makers’ responsibility. It suffices to impose the costs of the policy indirectly, e.g. via withholding at source. Everyday cognitive biases will do the rest. Our findings also have an important lesson for welfare state research. Much ink has been spilled in the field to explain how large welfare states endure in a world of mobile capital. Prasad (2005) summarizes one common answer: big welfare states survive by building their budgets on consumption taxes that “are ‘invisible’ and do not provoke resistance” (2005: 362). Our findings imply that this answer is wrong. Reliance on consumption taxes is no proof against resistance. Future research will have to sort out whether tax protest has any effect on social spending. 14 TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics for covariates of tax protest (N=3,210 country-tax-years) Std. Variable Mean Dev. Min. Max. Source A. Control variables measured at the level of the country-year Penn World Tables (Huber, Ragin, Stephens, Brady, and Beckfield Real GDP per capita (1996 $1,000s) 17.55 4.12 8.51 30.19 2004) International Labour Organisation, Social security transfers (% GDP) 13.99 4.6 3.72 28.91 (Huber et al. 2004) Left party share of cabinet 37.2 39.23 0 100 (Huber et al. 2004) Left party share of legislative seats 38.04 15.1 0 68.4 (Huber et al. 2004) (Budge, Klingemann, Volkens, Bara, and Election year (1=yes) 0.28 0.45 0 1 Tanenbaum 2001) B. Independent variables measured at the level of the country-tax-year (Organisation for Economic CoOperation and Tax ratio (% GDP) 5.99 6.36 0 30.59 Development 2003) Self-assessed? (1=yes) 0.03 0.18 0 1 Various (see text) Withheld at source? (1=yes) 0.48 0.5 0 1 Various (see text) Included in price? (1=yes) 0.11 0.31 0 1 Various (see text) Income tax? (1=yes) 0.17 0.37 0 1 OECD 2003 Goods and services tax? (1=yes) 0.17 0.37 0 1 OECD 2003 15 TABLE 2 Which taxes are objects of protest? Protest events against taxes in sixteen rich democracies, 1966-2000 Tax (OECD classification) Taxes on income, profits, and capital gains (1000) Social security contributions (2000) Taxes on payroll and workforce (3000) Taxes on property (4000) Taxes on goods and services (5000) Other taxes (6000) Events N % 20 30% 11 16% 0 0% 5 7% 33 49% 5 7% Note: Total N=67 events. Percentages do not sum to 100% because categories are not mutually exclusive: several events protested more than one tax. 16 TABLE 3 The determinants of tax protest: Logit regression of protest demands over six taxes in 15 rich democracies, 1965-2000 Income tax Goods and services tax Model 1 1.33** (0.44) 2.18*** (0.38) Model 2 0.74 (0.53) 1.75*** (0.42) 0.07* (0.03) Model 3 0.51 (0.57) 0.61 (0.69) 0.15** (0.05) -0.64 (1.16) -1.47* (0.72) 0.02 (0.57) -5.79*** (0.45) -0.00 (0.40) 33.16 2 -193.98 3,000 15 131 43 -6.13*** (0.50) 0.05 (0.40) 34.27 3 -192.15 3,000 15 131 43 -5.70*** (0.53) 0.64 (0.46) 35.55 6 -190.08 3,000 15 131 43 Tax ratio Self assessed Withheld at source Included in price Real GDP per capita Social security transfers/GDP Left party share of cabinet Left party share of legislature Election year Intercept ln(σ2u) Model 4 0.45 (0.57) 0.42 (0.76) 0.16** (0.05) -0.77 (1.22) -1.47* (0.72) 0.21 (0.62) -0.06 (0.05) -0.07 (0.07) 0.01† (0.01) -0.03† (0.02) -0.76† (0.43) -3.06** (1.10) 0.10 (0.51) 42.28 11 -183.71 3,000 15 131 43 Wald χ2 d.f. Loglikelihood N (country-tax-years) N (countries) N (spells) N (protest demands) Standard errors in parentheses. † p<.10 (two-tailed) * p<.05 (two-tailed) ** p<.01 (two-tailed) *** p<.001 (two-tailed) TABLE 4 Probabilities of tax protest predicted under various counterfactual tax policies Income tax that is... When tax ratio is... Low High 2% 36% 1% 21% 1% 11% 0% 6% Administratively assessed, collected directly Self-assessed, collected directly Administratively assessed, withheld at source Self-assessed, withheld at source Consumption tax that is... When tax ratio is... Low High 1% 5% 1% 6% Not included in prices Included in prices Predictions are based on Model 4. All control variables are set at their values for Finland in 1985, to approximate the sample average while ensuring that assumed values are historically cotenable. Low and high tax ratios are set within the historical range for the relevant tax within our sample of countries and years. A low tax ratio is 10% of GDP for income taxes and 5% for consumption taxes. A high tax ratio is 30% for income taxes and 15% for consumption taxes. 18 TABLE 5 Are the results sensitive to media selection bias? Logit regression of unconventional protest demands, with controls for reporting bias Model 5 Model 6 Model 7 Model 8 Income tax 0.57 0.62 0.34 0.33 (0.63) (0.65) (0.66) (0.66) Goods and services tax 1.16 1.38 0.64 0.63 (0.91) (0.97) (1.14) (1.11) Tax ratio 0.14* 0.14* 0.17* 0.17* (0.06) (0.06) (0.07) (0.07) Self assessed 0.36 0.37 ... ... (1.29) (1.33) Withheld at source -1.41† -1.40 -1.78† -1.82† (0.84) (0.86) (0.96) (0.95) Included in price -0.19 -0.27 0.06 0.03 (0.64) (0.72) (0.78) (0.76) Real GDP per capita -0.05 -0.08 -0.20 -0.14 (0.06) (0.18) (0.22) (0.21) Social security transfers/GDP -0.05 -0.06 -0.08 -0.05 (0.08) (0.10) (0.10) (0.10) Left party share of cabinet 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.01 (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) Left party share of legislature -0.02 -0.02 -0.02 -0.01 (0.02) (0.02) (0.03) (0.02) Election year -0.80† -0.76 -0.96† -0.98† (0.46) (0.50) (0.54) (0.54) Articles ... ... ... 0.00 (0.00) DV excl. conventional protest Y Y Y Y Model incl. year FE Y Y Y Sample excl. USA Y Y Controls for NYT coverage Y 2 ln(σ u) 0.14 0.25 0.23 -0.24 (0.52) (0.54) (0.53) (0.72) 2 Wald χ 41.15 47.74 43.53 44.73 d.f. 11 45 45 45 Loglikelihood -163.49 -138.04 -124.06 -123.43 N (country-tax-years) 3,000 3,000 2,802 2,802 N (countries) 15 15 14 14 N (spells) 126 126 117 117 N (protest demands) 38 38 35 35 Standard errors in parentheses. † p<.10 (two-tailed) * p<.05 (two-tailed) ** p<.01 (two-tailed) *** p<.001 (two-tailed) 19 APPENDIX A THE COMPARATIVE TAX PROTEST DATABASE The Comparative Tax Protest Database contains codes describing tax-related protest events in 16 rich, democratic countries from the 1960 through 2000. In order to minimize selection bias, we used a combination of “generic event descriptor” and “event-specific” search strategies to locate events in the full text of the Times, using the ProQuest Historical New York Times database (Maney & Oliver 2001). Our generic event descriptor was the following keyword string: “Country Name” w/doc tax* w/doc (demonstrat* or rall* or vigil* or picket* or strik* or campaign* or boycot* or petition* or riot*) where "Country Name" was replaced by the name of a particular country (including variants), “*” represents a wild-card, and “w/” represents the Boolean operator “and”. We read every resulting story, and coded all episodes of protest that we found. Our event-specific search strategy identified gaps in the resulting series of events by relying on the secondary literature (Confalonieri and Newton 1995; Flora 1986; Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Teich Adams 1990; Hibbs and Madsen 1981; Peters 1991; Wilensky 1976; Wilensky 2002) and on our reading of every article in Keesing’s Record of World Events mentioning “tax” or a cognate terms in conjunction with the name of any country in the sample. We filled in the gaps we identified by locating events in the Times and coding the description presented there. All codes were based on descriptions in the New York Times or Keesing’s Record of World Events where possible, though in a few cases we also referred to other periodical sources in order to identify the tax or taxes at issue.8 For inclusion in the database, an event had to satisfy three criteria: it had to involve (1) nongovernmental (2) collective action (3) in protest against existing or proposed taxes. The nongovernmental criterion was meant to exclude events whose only participants were governmental actors, a category that we construed to include elected and appointed public officials and political parties that were already represented in government or legislative bodies. It was not meant to exclude ballot initiative campaigns or the founding of new political parties. Our criterion for identifying an instance of collective action was the reported participation of three or more people. In practice, all events in the database far exceeded this threshold (see fn. 4). The third criterion—action in protest against existing or proposed taxes—was the most problematic. This criterion required us to make inferences about the tax-related substance of protesters’ demands. Where possible, we relied on the direct evidence of protesters’ own statements, as quoted or paraphrased in the Times (e.g., “The shopkeepers carried banners bearing such slogans as ‘Less Government, Lower Taxes’...” [Dionne 1983: A4]). Direct evidence was available for 7 of 67, or 10% of the events analyzed in this paper. If there was no direct evidence, we relied on reporters’ explicit statements imputing tax-related motives or demands to protesters (e.g., “The truckers are demanding... special advantages involving fuel and insurance taxes” [Vinocur 1984: 11]). Explicit statements imputing tax-related demands were available for 52 of 67, or 78% of 8 We also spot-tested our generic event descriptor search string in the full-text searchable Historical Wall Street Journal database, on the assumption that we could improve the validity of our data collection by consulting a newspaper that may have different and ideologically opposed editorial biases. We found no additional protest events in France or the U.S. 20 the events analyzed in this paper. If the reporter did not explicitly impute motives or demands, we inferred the presence of tax-related protest demands where the reporter appeared to impute tax-related motives implicitly by the association of events in the article (e.g., “While the chamber began a debate on the proposed new taxes and other unpopular measures to head off national insolvency, millions of Italians were on strike” [Hoffman 1974: 3]). Indirect inference was necessary for 8 of 67, or 12% of the events analyzed in this paper. 21 APPENDIX B. ACCOUNTING FOR PROTEST AGAINST ITALIAN INCOME TAXES Because Italy proved to be an influential outlier in all of our models, we conclude with a brief discussion of Italian tax protest. Italy contributed a substantial fraction of the protest demands in our database (14 of the 57 demands analyzed in this paper). As Table A illustrates, these protest demands exercise substantial influence on the statistical results when these are estimated over the full sixteen-country sample. Two findings are noteworthy. First, the frequency of protest against Italy’s self-assessed income taxes was sufficient to create a strong, positive and statistically significant relationship between self-assessment and protest in our sixteen-country sample that is not apparent in the fifteen-country sample that excludes Italy. Second, the lower and upper bounds of the coefficient estimates from a jackknife analysis show that Italian tax protests exercise a great deal of influence on other coefficient estimates as well: for eight of the twelve coefficients, either the upper or the lower bound on the coefficient estimates is the coefficient estimated over the sample excluding Italy. In other words, the estimates in the sixteen-country sample are heavily dependent on Italian tax protest. The finding that Italy is an outlier in protest is consistent with the stylized observations that Italian politics in this period were especially contentious across a variety of policy domains (Franzosi 1995; Tarrow 1989), and that Italian patterns of contention do not always fit comparative models well (see Nam 2007). But they raise the question of whether the Italian tax protests are to be interpreted as an especially informative case, or as a source of idiosyncratic noise that swamps the systematic patterns in the data. We address this question by presenting qualitative and historical data on Italian tax protest. First, is the measured coefficient of self-assessment spurious, or does the historical record support the view that self-assessment contributed to the high rate of protest against income taxes in Italy? The historical data suggest strongly that self-assessment mattered. Income tax protest broke out when the Italian state took conspicuous steps to control taxpayers’ declarations of their own tax liabilities. Although comparative data on income tax evasion are poor, income tax evasion was reported to be widespread in Italy, particularly among the self-employed, who were believed generally to under-assess their own incomes (Contini 1989; Peters 1991). The Italian state sought to increase its powers to control income tax evasion. Taxpayers often identified the state’s efforts to control tax evasion as the events that triggered their protests. In 1971, for example, the state proposed a tax reform that aimed to curb tax evasion by professionals, and Italian professionals responded by going on strike (New York Times 1971). In 1980, a proposed tax reform that would require restaurants to submit receipts with their income tax declarations provoked a one-day strike by restaurant owners and their employees (Tanner 1980). In 1984, new legislation designed to make it harder for shopkeepers to evade income taxes provoked a one-day strike by shopkeepers (Dionne 1984). Throughout this period, the state compensated for tax evasion by raising tax rates, inspiring the resentment of wage-earners who were subject to withholding and did not enjoy the same opportunities for tax evasion that self-employed proprietors and professionals did. In 1992, union leaders responded by calling a strike to demand explicitly that the government shift the tax burden from workers to the self-employed (Tagliabue 1992). The government offered a proposal that would side-step the difficult task of surveillance by simply requiring all self-employed people to declare a minimum taxable income of $20,000— and thereby provoked one-day protest by shopkeepers (Cowell 1992). All told, at least five of Italy’s 14 large tax protests recorded in our database were directly connected with the state’s efforts to monitor the self-assessment of income tax. By comparison, none of the protests 22 recorded in our database were connected with administratively assessed payroll taxes or social security contributions. Second, what of protest against other taxes in Italy? The frequency of protest against goods and services taxes may have to do with the contentious protest repertoire of Italy’s famously strike-prone labor unions (Franzosi 1995; Tarrow 1989). Union leaders often included cutting regressive sales taxes as one item on a long list of protest demands when they took to the streets. But the pattern of sales tax protest also appears to be at least partly spillover from conflict over Italy’s self-assessed income taxes. Public officials attempted to compensate for their inability to assess income by raising taxes on more easily monitored commercial transactions— including purchases of consumer goods and professional services—and thereby provoked protest by salespersons and professionals. In conclusion, we emphasize two points. First, the positive coefficient for self-assessment when Italy is included in the analysis provides further support for our argument that traceability is conducive to tax protest. Second, the main empirical conclusions of this paper are robust to the inclusion or exclusion of Italy. Income and consumption taxes are common objects of protest, and payroll taxes are not. The vulnerability of a tax to protest depends partly on its magnitude, and partly on whether it is collected at the source. People are most likely to protest taxes that are both burdensome and traceable. 23 TABLE A The influence of Italian tax protest: Logit regression of protest demands over six taxes in 16 rich democracies, 1965-2000 16-country sample Income tax Goods and services tax Tax ratio Self assessed Withheld at source Included in price Real GDP per capita Social security transfers/GDP Left party share of cabinet Left party share of legislature Election year Intercept ln(σ2u) 0.84 (0.56) 0.97 (0.73) 0.11* (0.05) 1.24†a (0.66) -1.18† (0.65) 0.12 (0.54) -0.08† (0.05) -0.04 (0.06) 0.00 (0.01) 0.01 (0.02) -0.40 (0.34) -4.17*** (1.09) 0.77 (0.55) 52.23*** Jackknife (all possible 15-country samples) Min. Max. [0.45 1.90] [0.42 1.55] [0.04 0.16] [-0.77 2.67] [-1.47 -0.81] [-0.22 0.32] [-0.10 -0.03] [-0.12 -0.02] [0.00 0.01] [-0.03 0.02] [-0.76 -0.29] [-4.54 -3.06] Wald χ2 d.f. 11 Loglikelihood -231.99 N (country-tax-years) 3,210 Standard errors in parentheses. † p<.10 (two-tailed) * p<.05 (two-tailed) ** p<.01 (two-tailed) *** p<.001 (two-tailed) a The sign and statistical significance of this coefficient depend on the inclusion of Italy Bold indicates a coefficient that was estimated on the 15-country sample that omits Italy. 24 REFERENCES Almeida, Paul D. 2003. "Opportunity organizations and threat-induced contention: protest waves in authoritarian settings." American Journal of Sociology 109:345-400. Amenta, Edwin and Yvonne Zylan. 1991. "It Happened Here: Political Opportunity, the New Institutionalism, and the Townsend Movement." American Sociological Review 56:250-265. Ardant, Gabriel. 1965. Théorie sociologique de l'impôt. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. Auerbach, Alan J. and James R. Hines, Jr. 2002. "Taxation and Economic Efficiency." Pp. 1348-1421 in Handbook of Public Economics, Volume 3, edited by A. J. Auerbach and M. J. Feldstein. New York: Elsevier Science B.V. Beck, Nathaniel. forthcoming 2007. "Time-Series-Cross-Section Methods." in Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, edited by J. M. BoxSteffensmeier. New York: Oxford University Press. Becker, Gary S. and Casey B. Mulligan. 2003. "Deadweight Costs and the Size of Government." Journal of Law and Economics 46:293-340. Belkin, Aaron and Evan Schofer. 2003. "Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk." Journal of Conflict Resolution 47:594-620. Benford, Robert D. 1997. "An Insider's Critique of the Social Movement Framing Perspective." Sociological Inquiry 67:409-430. Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26:611-39. Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. and Bradford S. Jones. 2004. Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. New York: Cambridge University Press. Budge, Ian, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, and Eric Tanenbaum. 2001. Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments, 1945-1998. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burns, Danny. 1992. The Poll Tax Rebellion. San Francisco: A.K. Press. Butler, David, Andrew Adonis, and Tony Travers. 1994. Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Camerer, Colin. 1995. "Individual Decision Making." in The Handbook of Experimental Economics, edited by J. H. K. a. A. E. Roth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Campbell, Andrea Louise. 2003. "Participatory Reactions to Policy Threats: Senior Citizens and the Defense of Social Security and Medicare." Political Behavior 25:29-49. —. 2005a. How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Activism and the American Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Campbell, John L. 2005b. "Fiscal Sociology in an Era of Globalization: Comparing Tax Regimes in Advanced Capitalist Countries." Pp. 391-418 in The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, edited by V. Nee and R. Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chetty, Raj, Adam Looney, and Kory Kroft. 2007. "Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence." Christian, Ernest S. and Gary Robbins. 2005. "A Misguided Tax Reform that Would Do More Harm than Good." Heritage Foundation. Clogg, Clifford C., Eva Petkova, and Adamantios Haritou. 1995. "Statistical Methods for Comparing Regression Coefficients between Models." American Journal of Sociology 100:1261-1293. 25 Confalonieri, Maria A. and Kenneth Newton. 1995. "Taxing and Spending: Tax Revolt or Tax Protest." Pp. 121-148 in Beliefs in Government, vol. 3: The Scope of Government, edited by O. B. a. E. Scarbrough. Oxford, U. K.: Oxford University Press. Contini, Bruno. 1989. "The Irregular Economy of Italy: A Survey of Contributions." Pp. 238-250 in The Underground Economies: Tax Evasion and Information Distortion, edited by E. L. Feige. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cordes, Joseph J. 2005. "Lump-sum Tax." Pp. 245 in The Encyclopedia of Taxation and Tax Policy, edited by J. J. Cordes, R. D. Ebel, and J. G. Gravelle. New York: Urban Institute Press. Cowell, Alan. 1992. "Italian Shopowners Protest Tax Plan." Pp. A11 in New York Times. Dionne, E. J., Jr. 1983. "French shopkeepers add protests to Paris student demonstrations." Pp. A4 in New York Times. New York. —. 1984. "Italians Cook the Books and Tax Collectors Simmer." Pp. E5 in New York Times. Dollery, Brian E. and Andrew Worthington. 1996. "The Empirical Analysis of Fiscal Illusion." Journal of Economic Surveys 10:261-297. Dornstein, Miriam. 1987. "Taxes: Attitudes and Perceptions and Their Social Bases." Journal of Economic Psychology 8:55-76. Earl, Jennifer, Andrew Martin, John D. McCarthy, and Sarah A. Soule. 2004. "The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action." Annual Review of Sociology 30:65-80. Einwohner, Rachel L. 2003. "Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943." American Journal of Sociology 109:650-75. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1985. Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fang, Hanming and Dan Silverman. 2006. "Distinguishing between Cognitive Biases." Pp. 47-81 in Behavioral Public Finance, edited by E. J. McCaffery and J. Slemrod. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ferree, Myra Marx. 2003. "Resonance and Radicalism: Feminist Framing and Abortion Debates of the United States and Germany." American Journal of Sociology 109:304-344. Finkelstein, Amy. 2007. "E-ZTax: Salience and Tax Rates." Flora, Peter, ed. 1986. Growth to Limits: The Wester European Welfare States since World War II. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Franzosi, Roberto. 1995. The puzzle of strikes: class and State strategies in postwar Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Frey, Bruno S. and Alois Stutzer. 2006. "Mispredicting Utility and the Political Process." Pp. 113-140 in Behavioral Public Finance, edited by E. J. McCaffery and J. Slemrod. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Gamson, William and David S. Meyer. 1996. "Framing Political Opportunity." Pp. 275-290 in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by D. McAdam, J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ganghof, Steffen. 2006. "Tax mixes and the size of the welfare state: causal mechanisms and policy implications." Journal of European Social Policy 16:360-73. —. 2007. "The Political Economy of High Income Taxation: Capital Taxation, Path Dependence, and Political Institutions in Denmark." Comparative Political Studies 40:1059-1084. Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1995. "Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis." American Political Science Review 89:882-897. 26 Gemmell, N., O. Morrissey, and A. Pinar. 2002. "Fiscal illusion and political accountability: Theory and evidence from two local tax regimes in Britain." Public Choice 110:199-224. Gemmell, Norman, Oliver Morrissey, and Abuzer Pinar. 2003. "Tax perceptions and the demand for public expenditure: evidence from U.K. micro-data." European Journal of Political Economy 19. Goldstone, Jack A. and Charles Tilly. 2001. "Threat (and Opportunity): Popular Action and State Response in the Dynamics of Contentious Action." Pp. 179-94 in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, edited by R. R. Aminzade, J. A. Goldstone, D. McAdam, E. J. Perry, W. H. J. Sewell, S. Tarrow, and C. Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, Jeff and James M. Jasper. 1999. "Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: the Structural Bias of Political Process Theory." Sociological Forum 14:27-54. Great Britain. Board of Inland Revenue. 1966-1983. Income Taxes Outside the United Kingdom. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Gurr, Ted Robert. 1993. "Why Minorities Rebel: A Global Analysis of Communal Mobilization and Conflict since 1945." International Political Science Review 14:161-201. Hansen, S. B. 1983. The Politics of Taxation: Revenue without Representation. New York: Praeger. Heidenheimer, Arnold J., Hugh Heclo, and Carolyn Teich Adams. 1990. "Taxation Policy." Pp. 183-217 in Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in America, Europe and Japan, edited by H. a. A. Heidenheimer. New York: St. Martin's Press. Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr. and Henrik Jess Madsen. 1981. "Public Reactions to the Growth of Taxation and Government Expenditure." World Politics 33:413435. Hoffman, Paul. 1974. "$5 billion more taxes asked for Italy." Pp. 3 in New York Times. New York. Huber, Evelyne, Charles Ragin, John D. Stephens, David Brady, and Jason Beckfield. 2004. "Comparative Welfare States Data Set." Northwestern University, University of North Carolina, Duke University and Indiana University. Javeline, Debra. 2003. "The Role of Blame in Collective Action: Evidence from Russia." American Political Science Review 97:107-121. Jenkins, J. Craig, David Jacobs, and Jon Agnone. 2003. "Political Opportunities and African-American Protest, 1948-1997." American Journal of Sociology 109:277-303. Kato, Junko. 2003. Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State: Path Dependence and Policy Diffusion. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kiser, Edgar and Aaron Matthew Lang. 2001. "Have we overestimated the effects of neoliberalism and globalization? Some speculations on the anomalous stability of taxes on business." Pp. 51-68 in The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis, edited by J. L. Campbell and O. K. Pedersen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kitschelt, Herbert P. 1986. "Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies." British Journal of Political Science 16:57-85. Koopmans, Ruud and Dieter Rucht. 2002. "Protest Event Analysis." Pp. 231-59 in Methods of Social Movement Research, edited by B. K. a. S. Staggenborg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni. 1995. New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 27 Landon, Stuart and David L. Ryan. 1997. "The Political Costs of Taxes and Government Spending." The Canadian Journal of Economics 30:85-111. Lindert, Peter. 2004. Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lo, Clarence Y. H. 1990. Small Property versus Big Government: Social Origins of the Property Tax Revolt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Loewenstein, George, Deborah A. Small, and Jeff Strnad. 2006. "Statistical, Identifiable, and Iconic Victims." Pp. 32-46 in Behavioral Public Finance, edited by E. J. McCaffery and J. Slemrod. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Mack, Connie III, John Breaux, William E. Frenzel, Elizabeth Garrett, Edward P. Lazear, Timothy J. Muris, James M. Poterba, Charles O. Rossotti, and Liz Ann Sonders. 2005. Simple, Fair, and Pro-Growth: Proposals to Fix America's Tax System - Report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Maney, Gregory M. and Pamela E. Oliver. 2001. "Finding Collective Events: Sources, Searches, Timing." Sociological Methods and Research 30:13169. Mare, Robert D. 2006. "Statistical Models of Educational Stratification-Hauser and Andrew's Models for School Transitions." Sociological Methodology 36:27-37. McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1996. "Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions." Pp. 23-40 in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by J. M. Doug McAdam, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, Doug and Yang Su. 2002. "The War at Home: Antiwar Protests and Congressional Voting, 1965 to 1973." American Sociological Review 67:696. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCaffery, E. J. and J. Baron. 2005. "The political psychology of redistribution." Ucla Law Review 52:1745-1792. —. 2006. "Thinking about tax." Psychology Public Policy And Law 12:106-135. McCaffery, Edward J. 1994. "Cognitive Theory and Tax." UCLA Law Review 41:1861-1947. McCaffery, Edward J. and Jonathan Baron. 2004. "Framing and Taxation: Evaluation of Tax Policies Involving Household Composition." Journal of Economic Psychology 25:679-705. McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 1977. "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory." American Journal of Sociology 82:12121241. McCarthy, John, Clark McPhail, and Jackie Smith. 1996. "Images of Protest: Dimensions of Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Washington Demonstrations, 1982 and 1991." American Sociological Review 61:478499. McCulloch, J. R. 1975 [1845]. A Treatise on the Principles and Practical Influence of Taxation and the Funding System, Edited by D. P. O'Brian. Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press. Meyer, David S. 2004. "Protest and Political Opportunities." Annual Review of Sociology 30:125-45. —. 2005. "Social Movements and Public Policy: Eggs, Chicken, and Theory." Pp. 1-26 in Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and 28 Democracy, edited by D. S. Meyer, V. Jenness, and H. Ingram. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Michels, Robert. 1968 [1915]. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: The Free Press. Mill, John Stuart. 2004 [1871]. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Miller, Joanne M. and Jon A. Krosnick. 2004. "Threat as a Motivator of Political Activism: A Field Experiment." Political Psychology 25:507523. Morgan, Kimberly J. and Andrea Louise Campbell. 2005. "Financing the Welfare State: Elite Politics and the Decline of the Social Insurance Model in America." Studies in American Political Development 19:173-95. Myers, Daniel J. and Beth Schafer Caniglia. 2004. "All the Rioting that's Fit to Print: Selection Effects in National Newspaper Coverage of Civil Disorders, 1968-1969." American Sociological Review 69:519-543. Nam, Taehyun. 2007. "Rough Days in Democracies: Comparing Protests in Democracies." European Journal of Political Research 46:97-120. New York State Tax Commission and Commerce Clearing House. 1940-1952. Tax Systems of the World. Chicago: Commerce Clearing House. New York Times. 1971. "Italian Professions Protest Tax Reform to Curb Evasions." Pp. 8 in New York Times. New York. —. 1974. "Danish Tax Measure Protested in Strike." Pp. 13 in New York Times. New York. Oates, Wallace E. 1988. "On the Nature and Measurement of Fiscal Illusion: A Survey." Pp. 65-82 in Taxation and Fiscal Federalism: Essays in Honor of Russel Mathews, edited by B. S. G. G. Brennan, and P. Groenewegen. Sydney: Australian National University Press. Oliver, Pamela E. and Gregory M. Maney. 2000. "Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events: From Selection Bias to Triadic Interactions." The American Journal of Sociology 106:463. Oliver, Pamela E. and Daniel J. Myers. 1999. "How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events." The American Journal of Sociology 105:38. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. 1990. Taxpayers' Rights and Obligations: A Survey of the Legal Situtation in OECD Countries. Washington, D.C.: OECD. —. 2003. Revenue Statistics of O.E.C.D. Member Countries, 1965-2003. Paris: O.E.C.D. —. 2006. Tax Administration in OECD and Selected Non-OECD Countries. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. Ortiz, David G., Daniel J. Myers, N. Eugene Walls, and Maria-Elena D. Diaz. 2005. "Where do we stand with newspaper data?" Mobilization 10:397-419. Østergård, Uffe. 1992. "Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture." Comparative Studies in Society and History 34:3-27. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1963 [1916]. The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology, vol. IV, Edited by A. Livingston. Translated by A. Livingston and A. Bongiorno. New York: Dover. Pedriana, Nicholas. 2006. "From Protective to Equal Treatment: Legal Framing Processes and Transformation of the Women's Movement in the 1960s." American Journal of Sociology 111:1718-1761. Peters, B. Guy. 1991. The Politics of Taxation: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell. Petersen, Trond. 1995. "Analysis of Event Histories." Pp. 453-517 in Handbook of Statistical Modeling for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by G. A. e. al. New York: Plenum Press. 29 Pierson, Paul. 1993. "When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change." World Politics 45:595-628. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. 1979. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage Books. Polletta, Francesca. 1997. "Culture and Its Discontents: Recent Theorizing on the Cultural Dimensions of Protest." Sociological Inquiry 67:431-450. Prasad, Monica. 2005. "Why is France so French? Culture, Institutions, and Neoliberalism, 1974-1981." American Journal of Sociology 111:357-407. —. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Puviani, Amilcare. 1973 [1903]. Teoria della Illusione Finanziara. Milano: Istituto Editoriale Internazionale. Rosenberry, Sara A. 1982. "Social Insurance, Distributive Criteria and the Welfare Backlash: A Comparative Analysis." British Journal of Political Science 12:421-447. Shafir, Eldar and Robyn A. LeBoeuf. 2002. "Rationality." Annual Review of Psychology 53:491-517. Slemrod, J. 2004. "Are corporate tax rates, or countries, converging?" Journal Of Public Economics 88:1169-1186. Slemrod, Joel and Shlomo Yitzhaki. 2002. "Tax Avoidance, Evasion, and Administration." Pp. 1425-1470 in Handbook of Public Economics, Volume 3, edited by A. J. Auerbach and M. J. Feldstein. New York: Elsevier Science B.V. Snow, David A., E. Burke Jr. Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. "Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation." American Sociological Review 51:464-481. Soule, Sarah A., Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Yang Su. 1999. "Protest Events: Cause or Consequence of State Action? The U.S. Women's Movement and Federal Congressional Activities, 1956-1979." Mobilization 4:23955. Steinmo, Sven. 1993. Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British, and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stults, Brian G. and Richard F. Winters. 2005. "The Political Economy of Taxes and the Vote." Swank, Duane and Sven Steinmo. 2002. "The New Political Economy of Taxation in Advanced Capitalist Democracies." American Journal of Political Science 46:642-655. Tagliabue, John. 1992. "Millions in Italy March in Protest." Pp. A5 in New York Times. Tanner, Henry. 1980. "Tax Revolt Closes Restaurants in Italy." Pp. 46 in New York Times. Tarrow, Sidney. 1996. "States and Opportunities: The Political Structuring of Social Movements." Pp. 41-61 in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by J. D. M. Doug McAdam, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, Sidney G. 1989. Democracy and disorder: protest and politics in Italy, 1965- 1975. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Twight, Charlotte. 1995. "Evolution of Federal Income Tax Withholding: The Machinery of Institutional Change." Cato Journal 14:359-396. 30 Van Dyke, Nella. 2003. "Protest Cycles and Party Politics: The Effects of Elite Allies and Antagonists on Student Protest in the United States, 1930-1990." Pp. 226-245 in States, Parties, and Social Movements, edited by J. A. Goldstone. New York: Cambridge. Van Dyke, Nella and Sarah A. Soule. 2002. "Structural Social Change and the Mobilizing Effect of Threat: Explaining Levels of Patriot and Militia Organizing in the United States." Social Problems 49:497-520. Vinocur, John. 1984. "French act to end truck blockades." Pp. 11 in New York Times. New York. Wagner, Richard. 1976. "Revenue Structure, Fiscal Illusion, and Budgetary Choice." Public Choice 25:45-61. Wilensky, Harold L. 1976. The 'New Corporatism,' Centralization, and the Welfare State. Beverly Hills: Sage. —. 2002. Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and Performance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Winter, Søren and Poul Erik Mouritzen. 2001. "Why People Want Something for Nothing: The Role of Asymmetrical Illusions." European Journal of Political Research 39:109-43. Zelenak, Lawrence A. 2003. "The Myth of Pretax Income." Michigan Law Review 101:2261-2274. 31