Miranda Stewart (University of Melbourne, Faculty of Law) has posted New Research on Tax Law and Political Institutions, 24 Tax Law & Political Institutions 1 (2006), on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Tax law and politics are intimately connected. For centuries, theorists of the state have observed that the power to collect revenues is a central feature of sovereignty or statehood. Since Schumpeter’s theory of the Tax State (1918, 1954), a body of literature that has been termed fiscal sociology, or fiscal politics, has considered the need for revenues as being a central and defining feature of the state and raising taxes as the most basic task of the state (Campbell, 1993; Gould and Baker, 2002). Theorists have posed two main questions: first, what is the impact of attempts to impose, or reform, taxation on the development of political institutions; and, second, what is the impact of political and other state institutions on attempts to reform taxation? A third question is: how to improve tax policy and law-making, with the goals of improving both tax law and governance outcomes? A significant international body of historical, legal, political and economic research produced in the past few decades has sought to answer these questions (Levi, 1988; Peters, 1991; Steinmo, 1993; Sandford, 1993; Hale, 2002; Eccleston, 2004). This volume presents new research that contributes to our understanding of all three questions.