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In this article we use an original data set to provide the first empirical analysis of the political economy of inherited wealth taxation that covers a significant number of countries and a long time frame (1816–2000). Our goal is to understand why, if inheritance taxes are often very old taxes, the implementation of inheritance tax rates significant enough to affect wealth inequality is a much more recent phenomenon. We hypothesize alternatively that significant taxation of inherited wealth depended on (1) the extension of the suffrage and (2) political conditions created by mass mobilization for war. Using a difference-in-differences framework for identification, we find little evidence for the suffrage hypothesis but very strong evidence for the mass mobilization hypothesis. Our study has implications for understanding the evolution of wealth inequality and the political conditions under which countries are likely to implement policies that significantly redistribute wealth and income.

The dominant narrative of the politics of redistribution in political science and economics highlights the signature role of the rise of electoral democracy and the development of political parties that mobilize working-class groups. We argue in this article that this narrative ignores the critical role played by mass warfare in the development of redistributive public policies. Focusing attention on the determinants of progressive taxation, we argue that mobilization for mass warfare led to demands for increased taxation of the wealthy to more fairly distribute the burden for the war effort. We then show empirically that during the past century, mass mobilization for war has been associated with a notable increase in tax progressivity. In the absence of war, neither the establishment of universal suffrage, nor the arrival of political control by parties of the left is systematically associated with large increases in tax progressivity. In making these arguments, we devote particular attention to a “difference-in-differences” comparison of participants and nonparticipants in World War I.

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal innovations, which persisted and helped to shape current fiscal institutions. Economic historians claim that greater fiscal capacity was the key long-run institutional change brought about by historical conflicts. Using casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to instrument for current fiscal institutions, we estimate substantial impacts of fiscal capacity on GDP per worker. The results are robust to a broad range of specifications, controls, and sub-samples.

What determines when states adopt war taxes to finance the cost of conflict? We address this question with a study of war taxes in the United States between 1789 and 2010. Using logit estimation of the determinants of war taxes, an analysis of roll-call votes on war tax legislation, and a historical case study of the Civil War, we provide evidence that partisan fiscal differences account for whether the United States finances its conflicts through war taxes or opts for alternatives such as borrowing or expanding the money supply. Because the fiscal policies implemented to raise the revenues for war have considerable and often enduring redistributive impacts, war finance—in particular, war taxation—becomes a high-stakes political opportunity to advance the fiscal interests of core constituencies. Insofar as the alternatives to taxation shroud the actual costs of war, the findings have important implications for democratic accountability and the conduct of conflict.

We link two cross-country datasets to analyse the relationship between individuals' patriotism and attitudes toward tax compliance. The datasets contain a number of variables that shape individuals' opportunities as well as expected benefits from tax evasion. We find a robust positive association between patriotism and tax compliance. The findings survive a variety of robustness checks, including an instrumental variables estimation to tackle the possible endogeneity of patriotism.

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.

Argues that the best predictor of conflict outcomes between the strong and the weak is the interaction of actor strategies, and that strong actors will lose when they use the wrong strategy against their weaker opponents' strategy; analyzes war outcomes, 1800-1998 and US intervention in Vietnam.

Institutional practices evolve to fill gaps in all constitutional blueprints. One of the underappreciated features of the initial constitutional settlement of war powers was the accountability of the executive through the process of budgetary authorization and the corresponding need for Congress to answer to the citizenry for the tax implications of military expenditures. This political accountability is more complex than often described, consisting not merely of the division of the Declare War and Commander-in-Chief Clauses of Article I and Article II, but also of the temporal limitation of the budgetary power for the army and a variety of practical and political obstacles to prevent the president from going it alone in warfare. The thesis of this Essay is that critical features of the ensuing constitutional equilibrium, which largely controlled the war power even in the absence of formally declared hostilities, have come undone as a result of the declining social and economic costs of modern forms of warfare, the development of the permanent and socially insular standing army, and the rise of its associated military-industrial complex as an independent institutional actor. The combination of an enormous, permanent military budget and the elimination of conscription has eroded the effectiveness of the institutional division of authority over war that emerged in the earliest days of the republic. This broader phenomenon of constitutional disequilibrium, in which constitutional doctrines and settlements prove dependent on the existing state of technology and institutional arrangements, in turn highlights the difficulty of managing today's warfare in a fashion that avoids executive unilateralism.

This essay shows how domestic government programs and tax regimes seemingly unrelated to war originated during such periods of conflict. The assessment confirms what Randolph Bourne famously stated that war is the health of the state (1918). Although social scientists tend to neglect war as a major cause of changes in social policy (Skocpol 1992, 39-40), some noted historians have concluded that war making is the true driver of state making, dwarfing other causes. The Madison quote might lead one to conclude erroneously that war's expenses, which lead to debt and taxes, are the only causes of the erosion of liberty when conflict arises. This paper goes even further and details domestic government programs (that is, the welfare state) that are seemingly unrelated to war efforts at first blush, but originated or expanded in times of conflict and by means of the new taxes initiated or increased during war to pay for them.

This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resistance to the concentration of economic power in the United States and the centralization of state power in France. In the United States, the rapid concentration of economic power in the late 19th century spurred a political movement for a tax with clear redistributive purposes. In France, resistance to the centralization of state power and concomitant fears of “fiscal inquisition” weakened the drive for an effective income tax, leaving the state to rely on consumption taxes to meet its revenue needs. These 19th‐century movements of resistance to modernization shaped the foundations of contemporary political economy.