Taxes, Sociology Of

Fiscal Sociology

The phrase fiscal sociology dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century; nevertheless, its tenets derive from the seventeenth century. This is the point at which nation-states systematized the collection of taxes, and pillage and plunder gradually were abandoned as methods of enriching governments. Rudolf Goldscheid (1870–1931) and Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) described the importance of this development to sociology generally and invented the phrase fiscal sociology. They argued that the organized collection of taxes was a governing force behind politics, economies, and societies. They challenged, for example, the Marxian account of history with a fiscal sociological analysis. The First and Second World Wars had a deleterious impact on the dissemination and development of the pair's research, but fiscal sociology as a discipline has enjoyed a resurgence in the beginning of the twentyfirst century.

Volume 61 (no. 1) of the American Journal of Economic and Sociology (2002) contains several pieces that attempt to revive fiscal sociology. For example, Jan-Peter Olters examines the interaction between political competition and tax policy, and Jürgen Backhaus provides an historical account of the development of this field of study and, in particular, of the idea of the tax state. This issue also considers ideas within the field of constitutional public finance.

Naoki Jinno and Andrew DeWit exemplify the uses to which the resurgence in fiscal sociology serve; they used Schumpeter's fiscal sociology to analyze a property tax revolt that occurred in Japan in the 1990s and explained that a historical institutionalist might describe the fiscal sociological approach as fiscal politics. They suggested that one could trace the roots of the Japanese revolt directly back to the fiscal system that existed in Japan during World War II. Legacies of this era include intergovernmental, territorial conflicts over both income and consumption taxes. They concluded that analyzing the way in which a government funds itself is perhaps the best place to start consideration of any society or political structure.

As Jinno and DeWit suggested, fiscal sociology generally is practiced from an historical perspective. The tools of this field of study also may be useful in more immediate contexts examining the events or processes that are still unfolding. Helena Blomberg and Christian Kroll, for example, considered studies that have analyzed public support for the welfare state in Finland. They concluded that tax policies tend not to have any effect on whether or not study participants support the Finnish welfare state. Although this work is neither explicitly from a fiscal sociological perspective nor from an historical perspective, Blomberg and Kroll's research constructed a link between tax systems and social policies, suggesting a connection to the reviving legacies of Goldscheid and Schumpeter.

Institutional Sociology and Taxes

Institutional sociology starts from a slightly different point than fiscal sociology. While fiscal sociology looks at the organized collection of taxes as a basis for societal organization and structure, institutional sociology is interested in those structures themselves. Specifically, institutional sociology deals with the response of organizations to institutional pressures. Institutional sociology, also referred to as organizational sociology, attracts researchers hoping to understand the ways in which organizations operate. Researchers interested in the sociology of accounting have employed both institutional economics and institutional sociology to this end.

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