International Cultural History of Tax Morale

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Korinna Schönhärl
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391208823

Scandals like the one concerning Uli Hoeneß, the Panama Papers or Donald Trump s attitude towards his duty to pay taxes (That makes me smart) has regularly provoked public indignation in recent years. The resulting debates center on the concept of the tax morale of certain groups of citizens. The semantic openness and flexibility of the concept makes it of use in various debates and in the media. It can easily be combined with different ideological elements, which create ideal types of the citizen and of social life. The semantics of tax morale not only differ between different cultural spaces, but also change over time, a factor rarely considered by social science and economic research on tax morale. This project uses the term tax morale, present in historical sources, as a concept of historical research: it pursues the question of how the semantics of tax morale vary in different types of welfare states and how the concept has been used by different actors. In addition, it reconstructs changes in the semantics between about 1940 and the end of the 1980s in a transnational comparison, aiming to detect breaks and continuities and thus allow a deeper understanding of the concept. The normative attitude of citizens vis-à-vis their tax duty is central for the ability of the state to balance differences in income and wealth through redistribution and to limit social inequality. It follows that the analysis of tax morale is closely connected with the social fair distribution of economic resources in society. This is one main hypothesis of the project. The historical analysis of tax morale therefore promises answers to highly current questions about the meaning of norms and values for the regular functioning of the tax and welfare state in the long run. The project takes a paradigmatic approach to research concepts of tax morale in Germany, the USA and Spain.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants