Does Taxation Lead to Representation?*

Are governments forced to democratize by their need for greater tax revenue? Most research on contemporary democratization says little about the effects of taxation. Yet there are good reasons to believe that taxation led to representation in the past: representative government first came about in early modern Europe when monarchs were compelled to relinquish some of their authority to parliamentary institutions, in exchange for the ability to raise new taxes; similarly, the war for independence in the U.S. began as a rebellion against British taxes. Some scholars argue that a comparable process is occurring today, by which tax revolts are producing heightened demands for democracy. These claims have never been carefully tested. In this paper, I explore the “taxation leads to representation ” argument, and test it using pooled time series cross-national data from 113 countries between 1971 and 1997. I find that one version of the argument appears to be valid, while another does not.