Why do governments levy taxes? What impact do taxes have on relations between governments and taxpayers, and how does this affect the willingness of governments to tax? Approaching these questions from a European historical perspective, one might imagine the answers to these questions to be straightforward. For there was a certain historical moment in the evolution of the state in Europe when these questions were easy to answer. Governments levied taxes primarily to pay the armies that defended their realms against the threat of attack by rival states. European taxpayers were then emboldened by the tax burdens imposed on them to make demands of the state. These developments are credited with the emergence of parliaments, democratization, and the accountability of rulers to the ruled. The possibility of holding the authorities to account meant that taxpayers could also resist state demands for higher taxes, forcing governments to relent by either refraining from taxation or by bargaining with the public to make the levies more acceptable through increased public-goods provision.
Lucy Martin’s book, Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States, is mainly about taxation in modern states, with a focus on the poor, developing, and weak states of Africa. It shows that taxation in Africa is not driven by the same impulses as in early modern Europe. African states do not face existential foreign threats similar to those that motivated their European counterparts to mobilize revenues for defensive purposes. And the nature of their political systems, many of which are practically electoral autocracies, do not provide taxpayers with the same possibility to vote out incumbents as in Western democracies. Also, although African governments levy taxes to fund public goods for the benefit of taxpayers, such are the levels of financial malfeasance by officials that significant amounts of tax revenue are lost to corruption.
Can taxpayers hold the government to account in such contexts? They can, through protests and riots, which could threaten leaders’ grip on power if they become violent and impossible to control. To avoid such eventualities, these states avoid levying onerous taxes on their citizens. Martin calls these manifestations of citizen discontent “accountability pressures.” I would argue that they are demonstrations of anger and frustration at behavior by governments, which, for the most part, citizens no longer count on to provide public goods—such as health, education, agricultural extension services, and the like—at least not in the quantity or quality the public desires.
In these circumstances, citizens are compelled to react angrily to (exercise voice at) the state’s attempts to over-tax them for services that they, for the most part, have already sought through private provision (exit). (See Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms and Organizations, 1970.) This, however, does not mean that states are entirely unable to tax or levy taxes de facto. They still do, as Martin illustrates in the seventh chapter with examples from Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni’s electoral autocracy. First, states can raise funds through what Martin calls “tax bargaining,” in which states use various approaches to convince citizens to pay taxes in return for certain benefits or service provisions. For example, Ugandan market vendors have resisted paying market dues on the ground that the money they were paying was not being used to improve the markets’ physical conditions and hygiene standards. Only when vendors were allowed to keep a portion of the money to address their collective challenges did they easily acquiesce to taxation. Second, Museveni’s government has imposed multiple indirect taxes, which raise significant amounts of money that may or may not go toward service provision. Because the public does not feel the weight of these taxes directly, they are less likely to provoke riotous anger. Here the author gives the example of value-added tax (VAT) on various goods and services. Taxpayers do not feel these levies as directly as they used to when they were paying graduated personal tax, which was abolished following sustained public resistance.
I recommend Martin’s book to readers who wish to understand the origins and drivers of taxation in pre-modern and modern times. Her work may add clarity to a longstanding debate about the narrow tax bases of aid-dependent countries (many of which are in Africa) and how or whether they can be widened. She shines light on the complex contextual factors that confront policymakers—no matter the nature of the polity they are operating in—when considering how and whom to tax, the magnitude of the levy, and therefore whether or how to widen the tax base. Key contextual factors include the amount of trust taxpayers have in the government to spend its revenue on services as well as whether the government can feasibly use coercion to ensure compliance.
The extensive use of a game-theoretic methodology, however, makes the book a somewhat challenging read, especially if mathematics and game theory are not your cup of tea. An exception is the seventh chapter, which focuses on taxation in Uganda under Museveni. As shown above, the chapter is informed by extensive interviews detailing the views and actions of actual taxpayers and decision-makers on issues including market dues and VAT. This methodology contrasts the previous chapters’ theoretical modeling with their sometimes speculative and highly debatable assertions.
Martin’s arguments in Strategic Taxation make me wonder what similar research in liberal democracies, such as Ghana or South Africa, might establish in terms of how governments handle taxation. Do they tax less? Do taxpayers wield more realistic power to hold their governments to account for unacceptable tax burdens? How does such pressure impact governments’ willingness to tax? Has this pressure made governments prefer indirect levies over direct taxation? The book provides tentative insights into these important questions. In Western democracies, politicians face a credible threat of losing election after implementing or championing unpopular policies. The power of voters therefore directly impacts their decision-making and often compels politicians to privilege tax bargaining over coercion, for example. Future research in emerging or fragile democracies in Africa or different politico-cultural contexts will shed further light on the relationship between democratic regime type and government willingness to tax.
