Citizen tax juries: democratizing tax enforcement after the Panama Papers

  • 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.

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Author:Gordon Arlen
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627665
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211018007
ISSN:1552-7476
Parent Title (English):Political theory
Publisher:Sage Publ.
Place of publication:Thousand Oaks, Calif. [u.a.]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2022
Date of first Publication:2021/08/12
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2022/05/02
Tag:critical realist democratic theory; deliberative democracy; inequality; minipublics; oligarchy; tax sheltering
Volume:50
Issue:2
Page Number:28
First Page:193
Last Page:220
Note:
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).
HeBIS-PPN:494755261
Institutes:Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 32 Politikwissenschaft / 320 Politikwissenschaft
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0