Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. This time it is a paper from David Brockington (University of Plymouth) and Todd Donovan (Western Washington University) looking at the political impact of increasing taxes.
After reviewing the work of others in this area, they focus in on council tax levels and election results in English local councils, comparing the performance of Labour and Conservative against changes in council tax levels:
We have tested if governments that presided over marginal increases in existing taxes lost vote share and seat share in the subsequent election. We find that taxes increased by Conservative-controlled local councils result in significant and substantive vote share loss and seat share loss for Conservatives. There is no such effect of rate increases from Labour-controlled councils. Indeed, our results suggest (but are not statistically significant) that Labour might actually benefit from tax increases that are imposed by Labour-controlled councils.
You can read their full research paper here and you can see the previous posts in this series here.
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5 Comments
Always good to see engagement with the academy, although I feel that particular finding might fall into the category sometimes referred to as “you don’t say …” research.
Or, perhaps more charitably, confirmatory research.
We find that taxes increased by Conservative-controlled local councils result in significant and substantive vote share loss and seat share loss for Conservatives. There is no such effect of rate increases from Labour-controlled councils.
I think the explanation is pretty simple: people who vote for the Conservatives don’t generally want higher taxes, so for the Tories to raise taxes makes people feel betrayed. Whereas if people vote for Labour they sort of expect them to raise taxes even if they haven’t campaigned on it, so are not fussed when they do.
Perhaps a similar thought process explains why student campaigners are exclusively targeting Lib Dem MPs over tuition fees rather than the Tories as well: as a student you expect the Tories to be the “nasty party”…
While we’re on the subject of academic studies on tax policy, the Economist reports on a paper that found no significant change in the odds of a government losing the next election just because it tightened fiscal policy. (Though it seems that raising taxes in unpopular compared with cutting spending in this study.)
The full paper “The Electoral Consequences of Large Fiscal Adjustments” is here:
Given the correalation between income and Labour voting presumably labour voters more likley to have their council tax covered by welfare payments and thus not care if taxes increase?