Edgar Kiser's research while affiliated with New York University Abu Dhabi and other places
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Publications (36)
Why do some people comply with their obligation to pay taxes while others do not? Scholars of tax behavior, particularly economists and political scientists, have relied on models of state coercion and state reciprocity to answer this question. Neither state coercion nor state reciprocity, however, sufficiently account for individuals who voluntari...
We investigate the relationship between economic development and the growth of the state by testing Wagner's Law. We begin with a general test, and find it does not hold in all cases: it breaks down at higher levels of development and in more recent time periods. This suggests that Wagner's law has specific scope conditions, beyond which states do...
In this paper we explore different perspectives on quality of government, discuss the implications of each for taxation, and provide a history of exemplary cases over time from each perspective.
This essay briefly summarizes recent work and suggests future directions in the study of taxation. We analyze the determinants of total tax revenue, tax structure, tax administration, and the relationship between taxation and spending. In the section on total tax revenue, we look at the effects of democracy, debates a possible ceiling on total reve...
In order to collect the revenue necessary to fund public goods, a state is often required to both deter tax evasion and encourage voluntary tax compliance on the part of its citizens. While most prior research has focused on explaining tax evasion with standard economic model parameters, there has been growing interest in identifying the determinan...
This review uses theories of political economy to provide an analytical history of systems of taxation, focusing on the determinants of total tax revenue, tax structure, and tax administration. We show that most premodern states extracted very little revenue and that total revenue increased substantially in the nineteenth century, and we explore th...
Un importante problema al que se enfrenta el mundo contemporáneo es el relativo a cómo cons-truir gobiernos efectivos donde no existen. Aquí se presentan los componentes que son esenciales para la construcción y el mantenimiento de un gobierno efectivo. Se identifican mecanismos mediante los cuales al menos algunos de esos componentes pueden y lleg...
One of the most important political legacies of colonialism in Africa has been the reliance on the model of centralized bureaucratic administration, which has had disastrous consequences for African state-building. Like the colonial systems before them, these centralized bureaucracies have not functioned effectively. One of the main problems is a l...
Debates about the methodology of comparative and historical work have raged since its inception. They are in part a function
of the difficulties encountered in this type of work — data from the past are not only incomplete but samples are biased and
several types of methods (experiments, surveys, observational techniques) cannot be used. Unfortunat...
This article uses the puzzle of Christian success in Korea to develop a model for understanding religious diffusion beyond national bor-ders. The authors argue that the microlevel network explanations that dominate the research on conversion cannot by themselves ac-count for the unusual success of Protestantism in Korea. Instead, events in East Asi...
It is now unfashionable to seek lessons from history. The overstatements resulting from various stage theories of history, most prominently modernization theory, and the current emphasis on the uniqueness of historical cases, has soured most contemporary sociologists on that endeavor. This is unfortunate, because rejecting the excesses of moderniza...
In contrast to some Second Wave structuralists (e.g., Skocpol, 1979), most contemporary comparative-historical sociologists support the non-reductionist version of methodological individualism (Weber, [1922]1978; Coleman, 1986) suggesting that any complete explanation of social phenomena must include an analysis of individual action as one of its c...
Almost all premodern states and empires used privatized tax collection. Roman history is a good research site for the study of tax farming because it provides ample variation on its extent and effectiveness while controlling for many other factors. Tax farming began in the early Republic, was expanded but became more exploitative in the late Republ...
Almost all premodern states and empires used privatized tax collection. Roman history is a good research site for the study of tax farming because it provides ample variation on its extent and effectiveness while controlling for many other factors. Tax farming began in the early Republic, was expanded but became more exploitative in the late Republ...
Analytic Narratives [Bates et al. 1998] makes a path-breaking contribution to historical methodology by combining formal theory and historical narrative. It includes both a general manifesto for their argument that rational choice models using extensive form game theory can be used to construct narratives of particular historical outcomes, and a se...
Most historical sociologists study macro-level outcomes, explain them using macro-level causes, and test their arguments using macro-level data. Although all of these scholars realize that individual action brought about these outcomes, and few believe that these individuals are either just bearers of social structure or cultural dopes, explicit di...
Though organizationally driven geographic mobility is a distin- guishing feature of modern careers, accounts of its origin are murky. Drawing on various theories of organization, the authors show how a merger wave exposed competing institutional logics and triggered the elaboration of the modern, mobile, bureaucratic career. Using organizational da...
Why did a partially bureaucratized administrative system develop in Qin China about two millennia before it did in European states? In this paper, comparative historical arguments about war and state-making are combined with agency theory to answer this question. The Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras that preceded the Qin unification of Chi...
As rational choice theory has moved from economics into political science and sociology, it has been dramatically transformed. The intellectual diffusion of agency theory illustrates this process. Agency theory is a general model of social relations involving the delegation of authority, and generally resulting in problems of control, which has bee...
We explore the relationship between voting rights and taxation in medieval England and France. We hypothesize that voting was a wealth-enhancing institution formed by the ruler in order to facilitate profitable joint projects with subjects. We predict when voting rights and tax payments will be linked to each other, as well as to the projects induc...
Although the causal impact of war on state-making in the early modern era is now widely accepted, there is less consensus
about the way in which war affects levels of taxation, and the factors that might strengthen or weaken the relationship. Two
questions can be posed: Do individual wars produce immediate effects on taxes, or is the cumulative eff...
This article explores the relationship between revolution and the bureaucratization of tax administration in early modern England and France. Revolution produces bureaucratization only when the monitoring capacity of states is developed enough to make bureaucratic organization more efficient than alternatives such as tax farming and collection by l...
In the past two decades, many sociologists have denied the usefulness of general theories in favor of more particularistic approaches to historical explanation, which makes it difficult to specify both the causal relations and the causal mechanisms that account for social outcomes. This article offers some philosophical and theoretical justificatio...
This paper argues that, in the middle ages, voting institutions emerged as mechanisms that allowed rulers to cooperate with subjects on mutually profitable projects. In spite of their utility, many of these voting institutions eventually declined. The authors test the model on the English parliament and the French estates general. The historical ev...
Following Kant, many scholars have argued that rulers often benefit more from war than do their subjects, and thus that rulers with more autonomy from subjects will initiate more wars. They usually test this argument by focusing on whether democratic states are less prone to initiate wars than autocracies, and generally find little or no relationsh...
In spite of the fact that state tax collection systems in less-developed countries generally are characterized by high levels of tax evasion and official corruption, little experimentation with privatized tax collection has occurred in these countries. This is due in part to: (1) The fact that the literature on privatization has not focused on tax...
A principal-agent model of relations between rulers and state officials is used to derive several propositions concerning the amount and type of corruption in state bureaucracies. The model is applied to the fiscal bureaucracies of Ming and Qing China, focusing on how problems rulers faced measuring taxable assets and monitoring and sanctioning sta...
This article uses a rational choice model of the origins of democracy to analyze the political history of medieval England from the Norman conquest to the Hundred Years War. Why did a country just taken over by a ruler more autocratic than his predecessors develop a political system increasingly dominated by the rule of law and protodemocratic inst...
The methodological foundations of comparative-historical sociology have been transformed dramatically in recent years. Arguments against general theoretical models have proliferated, while the complexity and uniqueness of historical events and the virtues of inductive methods have been emphasized. The growing convergence of sociology and history ha...
Citations
... The formation of the early modern state is largely a story about the centralization of state functions and institutions (at least among those states that survived), as increasingly bureaucratic monarchies took over military, judicial, and revenue collection duties from noble estates and local authorities (Pfaff and Kiser 2003). In this process, the arrangements made by centralizing rulers could either lay the foundations for autocracy and economic stagnation or create a pathway to constitutionalism and growth. ...
... The negative impact of tax evasion on government income has terrible costs for the economy. It plunges revenue required by governments to invest in significant facets of society including health, education and infrastructure development (Robbins & Kiser, 2020). Hence, tax education enhances the level of tax compliance. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/277146800017412-1443088354593_Q64/Blaine-Robbins.jpg)
... Dos buenos ejemplos de la opción excluyente del análisis narrativo por la microfundamentación sonLevi (2007); yKiser y Welser (2007). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/858486455947266-1581690529562_Q64/Howard-Welser.jpg)
... Governments wishing to significantly increase social spending face a conundrum: clear majorities of citizens want higher public social spending, but they seem unwilling to increase their own tax burden to pay for it. Indeed, while social expenditures are slowly rising, tax revenues are stagnating in advanced democracies (Karceski and Kiser, 2020). We know from public opinion research that the majority of citizens desire additional public spending but prefer to limit tax increases to high-income citizens (Barnes, 2015). ...
... Our study has the following distinctive features from previous literature: First, most studies have covered the link between the types of public goods and services to tax compliance, having examined cases from developed countries (Alm et al., 1993;Casal et al., 2016;Doerrenberg, 2015;Glaser & Hildreth, 1999;Lamberton et al., 2017;Robbins & Kiser, 2018). However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence for the issue of willingness to pay taxes in developing countries. ...
... For education, we restricted our manipulations to workers with a high school diploma and those with a college degree, roughly constituting the two most common educational 3 As in most FSEs, we chose to manipulate a finite number of characteristics of person A and person B. Although this strategy undermines cognitive overload and fatigue effects, which can increase measurement error and nonresponse bias, it also decreases the generalizability and scope of our findings (Auspurg and Jäckle 2017;Robbins and Kiser 2018). In other words, estimates of a social norm and elements of a research design are tightly coupled (Jasso 2006). ...
... This, in turn, stifles economic growth by discouraging innovation and job creation. It is crucial to consider these factors and their potential consequences, as highlighted in the literature, in order to ensure a transparent and conducive tax environment that fosters sustainable economic development (Çera et al. 2019;Kiser and Karceski 2017;Kouam and Asongu 2022). ...
... When coercion is prohibitively expensive, the state must rely on the instrumental compliance of citizens with state-building schemes (Levi 1988;Migdal 1988). Since the state's informational capacity affects its ability to tax its citizens (Kiser and Sacks 2009;Stasavage 2020), building this capacity relies on structuring the parameters of informational transactions with citizens that induce them to comply in spite of the costs. In this article, I consider how these parameters are set, articulate their implications for the state's coverage, and take advantage of a rich empirical setting in postindependence Tanzania to provide quasiexperimental evidence supporting the argument. ...
... In any case, that at least some assumptions of narrow RCT are in no way inimical to sociology is testified by Karl Marx's and Max Weber's (for the latter see Kiser, 2006) use of them in convincingly explaining various social phenomena, explanations that are praised by sociologists even today. It is actually interesting how Marxists tend to be highly critical of narrow RCT, while tolerating and even embracing it either when endorsing Marx's (implicitly RCT) arguments or making their own (implicitly RCT) explanatory claims (e.g., Callinicos, 2004). ...
... Thus Kiser (1986Kiser ( -1987 suggests that the most autonomous early modern monarchs had independent resources and faced the weakest monitoring (legislative and judicial) institutions. Kiser et al (1995) show that in the case of war-a policy that rulers tended to favor more than their subjects-high ruler autonomy resulted in more frequent war initiation in early modern Western Europe. ...
Reference: SOCIOLOGICAL RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
