Amleto Cattarin (NYU) has published  Hands Off My Taxes! A Comparative Analysis of Direct Democracy and Taxation, 9 J. L. Soc'y 136 (2008).  Here is the abstract:

The purpose of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of direct democracy related to fiscal matters. This research will be based on the experience of a number of European countries compared to one U.S. state, California, which was chosen due to Proposition 13, one of the classic examples of conflict between a state organization and its citizens. Failing a trustworthy relation that legitimates taxation, beyond the employment of rough power, common rhetoric shows the value of direct democracy against and at the expense of representative democracy. Politicians of several European countries have established, somewhat paternalistic legal systems in which direct democracy tools, even though provided, either had not the fiscal matter amongst their objects or were explicitly precluded, as in the case of Italy. The reasons for the exclusion were simple and easily challenged by the representative democracy’s contenders and they were the fear that the people could repeal the tax laws enacted by the legislative bodies, disavowing their representatives and depriving the state of the supposed necessary funds for its running. The California model seems somehow to back up those concerns, by revealing a dark side: that even direct democracy tools often work with inherent pitfalls and shortcomings, held against representative democracy. It is a question of partisanship, shallow knowledge of real issues, manipulability. A Manichean attitude which imputes any sort of disgrace to the representative form of government and exalts the purity and the originality of propositions and referenda – a stark and genuine voice of the people – could be incorrect on both counts. The development of civics, through the new ways that information technology permits, might succeed on implementing the idea of an ‘active society’, theorized about 40 years ago, in which the spaces between the public and the private lessen thanks to greater awareness on the use of both systems by educated citizens.