TY  - JOUR
A1  - Arlen, Gordon
T1  - Citizen tax juries: democratizing tax enforcement after the Panama Papers
T2  - Political theory
N2  - Four years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent moral-political problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs on democracies and exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary tax sheltering occurs within the letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative minipublics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand accountability, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over essential economic processes.
KW  - oligarchy
KW  - inequality
KW  - tax sheltering
KW  - deliberative democracy
KW  - minipublics
KW  - critical realist democratic theory
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62766
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627665
SN  - 1552-7476
N1  - This research has been supported by the Dutch National Science Organization’s Vidi Project Legitimacy Beyond Consent (grant n.016.164.351) and the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation through the Justitia Center for Advanced Studies (Goethe University Frankfurt).
VL  - 50
IS  - 2
SP  - 193
EP  - 220
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - Thousand Oaks, Calif. [u.a.]
ER  -