Ethnic Minorities, Interstate War, and Popular Support for Fiscal Capacity Development

Do ethnic majorities and minorities have diverging preferences for fiscal capacity? Do these preferences converge during national emergencies such as interstate war? In this paper, we provide evidence from a natural experiment to demonstrate that politically salient minority-majority divisions under...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inComparative political studies Vol. 56; no. 9; pp. 1365 - 1397
Main Authors Walter, André, Emmenegger, Patrick
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2023
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Capacity building approach
Discontinuity
Emergencies
Ethnic groups
Minority groups
Public opinion
Taxation
World War I
political economy
ethnic divisions
state building
war
experimental research
taxation
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Summary:Do ethnic majorities and minorities have diverging preferences for fiscal capacity? Do these preferences converge during national emergencies such as interstate war? In this paper, we provide evidence from a natural experiment to demonstrate that politically salient minority-majority divisions undermine the development of fiscal capacity. In addition, we show that the pressure of interstate war is insufficient to supersede differences in support for the expansion of state’s capacity for taxation between majority and minority groups. More specifically, we employ a regression discontinuity design using a natural border that separates linguistic groups and municipality outcomes of a popular vote on the introduction of direct taxation at federal level in Switzerland during the First World War. The findings suggest that salient minority-majority divisions have a negative effect on the expansion of states’ capacity for taxation even during periods of interstate war.
ISSN:0010-4140
1552-3829
DOI:10.1177/00104140221139375