Taxing inequality and fiscal sociology

Akos Rona-Tas
In recent years, fiscal sociology has grown to become one of the most vibrant subfields in economic sociology. For a long time, its core topic – public finance – was considered to lie beyond the discipline of sociology, despite the contributions of Rudolph Goldscheid, Fritz Karl Mann, and Joseph Schumpeter, the founders of fiscal sociology over a century ago, who established that there is an essential connection between state finances and the wider social order. New fiscal sociology is reclaiming this connection at a time when the role of the state in the economy is becoming increasingly pronounced and visible.

Isaac William Martin
In the past three decades, scholars of welfare policy in the United States have come to recognize tax privileges as an important part of the US social policy regime. A tax privilege is a provision of law or customary practice that grants favorable treatment to particular activities or categories of persons by excusing them from specified tax obligations to which they would normally be subject. Scholars have documented a great number and variety of formal and informal tax privileges provided by federal, state, and local governments.

Sarah Quinn
The sociological study of credit in political economies is a useful entry point for understanding what economic sociology can bring to the study of public finance. In this research note, I want to highlight one aspect of this, namely how a sociological focus on the political economy of credit enables an approach to public finance that is both critical and expansive.

Gisela Huerlimann
In the twenty-first century, taxation has become a major object of contestation in international political and economic relations and has given rise to attempts to establish global fiscal governance. In this way, the international community is trying to harness the power of multinational enterprises (MNE), which can be seen, among other things, in their ability to shift profits, investments, and branch offices to the places with the most beneficial tax conditions.

Josh Pacewicz
Students of contemporary statecraft have long argued that welfare states shape societies. Social programs do not merely provide benefits to individuals. They reinforce or undermine social hierarchies and shape citizens’ views about natural bases of political solidarity (Esping-Anderson 1990). In southern Europe, for instance, corporatist welfare regimes tied social protections to the male breadwinner and other traditional social institutions, while means-tested programs in Anglo-Saxon nations reinforce the social stigma of direct public benefits.

Monica Prasad
For some years now Republicans at state and national level have been playing what some scholars have called “constitutional hardball,” implementing strategies that, while technically legal, undermine the spirit of the laws: stealing a Supreme Court seat, tricking Democrats into being absent for crucial votes, suppressing votes. Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2019) suggest that this is because the Republican Party’s base of white voters is shrinking, and Republicans would lose in a fair electoral contest. The long-term solution, they argue, is for the party to diversify.

Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander · 2020
Failure.
Cambridge: Polity Press
Reviewer: Timo Seidl

Christoph Deutschmann · 2019
Disembedded Markets: Economic Theology and Global Capitalism
Abingdon: Routledge
Reviewer: Jacob Habinek