Clint Wallace (South Carolina; Google Scholar), Book Review, 8 British Tax Rev. 296 (2025) (reviewing Taxation, Citizenship and Democracy in the 21st Century (Yvette Lind (BI Norwegian Business School; Google Scholar) & Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar) eds. 2024)):
The editors of this volume diplomatically challenge the “conservative amount of communication” between scholars focusing on taxation, citizenship and democracy. In this helpful compendium of research, they seek to bring some coherence to these notably disparate fields. The need for this effort is, frankly, acute. Tax regimes in democracies around the world are regularly described as unfair, inefficient and in-administrable. Taxpayers have, in just the last decade, repeatedly led angry demonstrations against the existing and proposed tax laws. Similar complaints have echoed across modern and pre-modern times, sometimes escalating into protests and uprisings. Yvette Lind starts the book with a reference to the democratic innovation in Magna Carta, which limited the sovereign’s authority to impose taxes unilaterally, noting that it was echoed in the Boston Tea Party half a millennium later in calls for “no taxation without representation”. As she observes, we do, indeed, “find this battle cry throughout history”: again and again, tax has motivated uprisings to reset policy or even overthrow governments, from France’s uprising against les fermiers generaux three centuries ago, to the Zulu rebellion in South Africa in the early 1900s, property tax revolts in the US in late 1970s, to the poll tax revolt in England, and many times and places in between and since.
Tax revolts have resulted in the birth of democracies, shaped democratic governments from within and threatened democratic regimes. To be sure, it is an immense intellectual challenge to unify the work that accounts for the varied concerns that underlie these political movements and moments. This book offers will be a helpful resource for any scholars answering the call of the current economic-political environment, in which tax policy seems to be undermining—or, at very least, failing to strengthen—fragile democratic governing arrangements around the world.
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