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SoSe 22: Global Tax Politics

Lukas Hakelberg

Kommentar

Rising income and wealth inequality are defining features of our time and they cause many problems. Among other things, scholars have shown that inequality threatens democracy by reducing voter turnout, biasing policy towards the preferences of the affluent, and reducing intergenerational mobility, thereby undermining the promise of equal opportunity. Studies have also associated rising inequality with slowing economic growth and intensifying trade wars. The progressive taxation of high incomes, property, wealth, and inheritance is a crucial instrument for the reduction of wealth and income inequality. But despite their proven effectiveness, most democracies have not responded to rising inequality by increasing the above taxes. Instead, they have often cut them further. In this seminar, we investigate why it is so hard to tax the rich. The first goal is to familiarize you with the main explanations of this puzzle, including business power, complexity, voter preferences, and capital mobility. The second goal is to enable you to come up with your own research designs for the study of tax politics towards the end of the seminar. To this end, the seminar is divided into three main parts. In the first part, we familiarize ourselves with our dependent variable (progressive taxation) and the main elements of research design in the social sciences. In the second part, we study the most compelling explanations for declining taxes on the rich, systematically analyzing the research designs applied in the required readings. In the third part, we reverse the research design process. In a first step, you will put yourselves in the position of the author of an important work on tax politics, developing a grant proposal that could have stood at the beginning of her research endeavor. In a second step, you will systematically help each other in getting from a research topic to a puzzle and research question that you can then use as a starting point for your term paper or master thesis. Schließen