Law Commons^™

Interlinking Between Income Tax, Citizenship And Democracy? A Case Study Of Canada And China, Jinyan Li

Conference Papers

The interlink between taxation, citizenship and democracy appears to be obvious in Western democracies: citizens are voters, taxpayers and beneficiaries of public spending funded by tax revenues. The literature on the politics of taxation suggests that democratic institutions affect taxation at every stage of the policy-making process, the type of elections and governance model influence the level of redistribution and complexity of the tax system, democracies generally choose policies that are more favorable to the poor than non-democracies, the tax mix varies with the nature of the political regime, and more repressive governments rely less on personal income taxation. Political …