Conceptualizing fiscal citizenship

Although the willingness to pay taxes and citizenship are interconnected through the social contract, researchers have studied these topics mainly independently of each other. We synthesize literature from various social science disciplines (e.g., economics, political science) on both research fields to the novel multidimensional concept of fiscal citizenship by developing a concept tree. Fiscal citizenship comprises behaviors, attitudes, and identifications of citizens towards the state and fellow citizens that arise through the payment of taxes and are based on the idea of reciprocity. At the micro level, it is to be considered a gradual individual trait; aggregated at the country level, it represents the overall fiscal and civic climate within a state and serves as an indicator of social cohesion. The concept encourages scholars as well as policymakers and tax administrations to consider alternative perspectives on taxation. Furthermore, our concept tree enables future research to empirically operationalize and measure fiscal citizenship. This chapter develops a concept tree that captures the resulting multidimensional concept of fiscal citizenship. The concept is structured along the two central relationships between citizens and the state and between fellow citizens that are created by any system of taxation and welfare redistribution. It may serve as a tool to map and connect previous ideas and findings, derive innovative hypotheses and gain new insights. Furthermore, the concept enables the operationalization and empirical measurement of fiscal citizenship with microanalytical data. This allows for the first comprehensive analysis of the interconnection between taxes and citizenship and its meaning for social cohesion by future research.