For most of the twentieth century, the study of taxation was the province of economists, and the research literature on taxes was concerned with market efficiency and distributional equity, to the near exclusion of other issues. That is changing: The works reviewed here, by a sociologist and a political scientist, respectively, exemplify the recent revival of what Joseph Schumpeter called “fiscal sociology.” Like other scholars of the new fiscal sociology, these authors use comparative methods to identify causal relationships between the revenue policies of particular states and the characteristics of their environing societies. In particular, both focus on the relationship between effective tax administration and cultural norms that legitimate taxation.

Marcelo Bergman's Tax Evasion and the Rule of Law in Latin America concerns the relationship between tax administration and the cultural norm of tax compliance. You might expect such norms to be irrelevant if you have a rational enforcement bureaucracy that wields the credible threat of sanctions. Instead, the comparative evidence suggests that strong enforcement goes hand in hand with informal cultural taboos on tax evasion; tax administration and tax culture seem to function as complements, not substitutes. One hypothesis to explain this pattern is that bureaucratic administration fosters compliance norms by reassuring compliant taxpayers that free riders are not taking advantage of them. Another, alternative hypothesis is that a tax compliance culture improves the quality of tax administration, by reducing the costs of surveillance and enforcement. Bergman argues that both hypotheses are correct, and that the causation is reciprocal. We should, therefore, expect polities to tend toward one of two equilibria, a high-compliance equilibrium or a low-compliance equilibrium.

Bergman subjects his theory to an impressive battery of tests, drawing especially on detailed qualitative and quantitative comparisons of high-compliance Chile to low-compliance Argentina. These two countries differ with respect to tax culture, but are otherwise similar with respect to levels of development, colonial legacies, and revenue strategies. The author argues that their tax cultures are self-reproducing equilibria in which administrative enforcement and cultural norms reinforce each other. He draws on several original surveys to show, for example, that Argentines, in comparison to Chileans, believe that their tax administration has less information about their finances (p. 89); believe their odds of detection are much lower if they cheat (p. 92); and are more willing to risk underreporting their tax liability—especially if they have previously been audited (pp. 96, 99). He presents longitudinal administrative data from a matched sample of audited and unaudited taxpayers to support his thesis that the low compliance rate of audited taxpayers is a perverse causal effect of audits gone wrong: Taxpayers who are audited only superficially learn that the tax administration is “all bark but no bite” (p. 124), and reduce their subsequent tax compliance accordingly (pp. 136–37, 151). Bergman also reports experimental evidence that information about the frequency of noncompliance affected the likelihood that subjects would cheat in a repeated assurance game (pp. 193–4). And he rounds out the study with a simulation to show that the choice of audit strategy matters a great deal; the wrong strategy will do little to deter the spread of cheating in a population of rational agents who look to their social environment for information about the odds of getting caught (p. 232). Differences in tax culture, in short, are endogenous to differences in the quality of tax enforcement.

As this partial summary suggests, the book draws on an impressive collection of data. Bergman's comparative research design is exemplary, and his book may be read with profit even by comparativists who do not study taxation or Latin America. It would be a good teaching text for a graduate seminar on research methods.

How persuasive is all this evidence? It is inevitable in a study of tax compliance that many of the measurement decisions will remain debatable. The behavior at issue—noncompliance—is not observed directly but must be inferred from national income statistics, administrative records showing variability in tax payments, potentially incriminating and therefore unreliable survey self-reports, and the like. Bergman relies of necessity on different data sources for the two countries, and the measures are not always as comparable as one would like. The samples of audited and unaudited taxpayers are matched on a few observable characteristics, but taxpayers were not randomly assigned to these groups, and the experiments, which did randomly assign audits, failed to reproduce the finding that audit reduces subsequent compliance (p. 195), and so this key causal inference is by no means certain. Still, for all of these quibbles, I expect that this is about as definitive a treatment as this subject is likely to get in a real world of constrained research design. The book persuaded me that Argentina is probably caught in a noncompliance trap, and that a culture of noncompliance is endogenous to weak enforcement.

I was somewhat less persuaded by the evidence that efficient tax administration can initiate a virtuous circle. By some measures, Chilean auditors seem no more effective than their Argentine counterparts (see, e.g., pp. 136, 151), and the simulation results suggest that it is easier to tear down a culture of tax compliance by auditing carelessly than to build one up by auditing wisely (p. 232). Bergman presents some historical evidence to show that compliance behavior in the two countries has differed at least since the 1970s (pp. 71–73), but the book left me wondering what miracle put Chile on the virtuous path in the first place.

If Sheldon Pollack is right, the answer is probably war. The question of critical junctures in tax administration is addressed explicitly in Pollack's War, Revenue and State Building. This book concerns the United States, which appears in Bergman's study as a shadow case that exemplifes a strong culture of tax compliance and effective administration (see, e.g., pp. 4–5, 70, 111, 166). As Pollack points out, however, the United States is also known to comparativists for an ideological climate that is distinctively hostile to taxation. His central question concerns how these observations of the United States can be reconciled: Given the antistatist political culture of the United States, how did it “emerge in the twentieth century as the most powerful nation-state in the world with a robust revenue system capable of supporting a global military force as well as the panoply of expensive social welfare programs adopted since the 1930s?” (p. 107). The answer, he argues, is that the cultural barriers to effective revenue administration were episodically relaxed during total wars, when elites overcame their reluctance to tax and people overcame their reluctance to pay. The result was “a series of sporadic episodes in state building” (p. 108) that expanded the revenue-raising capacity of the federal government.

This argument is not particularly novel, which is another way of saying that it is consistent with a large literature. The connections among war, revenue, and state building will be familiar to anyone who is versed in the comparative scholarship on early-modern state formation. A similar “punctuated equilibrium” argument to Pollack's has been applied to the development of the U.S. tax state in W. Elliot Brownlee's Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (1996), among many others. Pollack knows these literatures and reviews them ably here. Indeed, the greatest contribution of his book may be precisely in bringing these literatures together by explicitly comparing the late modern United States to early modern Europe. Whereas Bergman compares similar systems in order to isolate the causes of taxpaying culture, Pollack uses comparison to show that similar causal mechanisms operate in very different social environments (pp. 36–37), and, most provocatively, to show that the basic dynamics of state formation in this precocious industrial democracy were similar to those in the agrarian autocracies of early modern Europe. One implication of his argument is that the causal variables most commonly emphasized by scholars of American politics—the preferences of the median voter, the institutional rules of Congress, the federalist order enshrined in the Constitution, and the character of the party system—may have little to do with explaining the growth of the American tax state. Total wars have increased state capacity to extract resources at least since the fifteenth century, even in societies that did not have voters, legislatures, written constitutions, or political parties (see pp. 62–67).

These two books help to solve some puzzles in comparative fiscal sociology, but their juxtaposition leaves us with a new puzzle. In comparative perspective, the United States appears to possess both a strong tax compliance culture and a conspicuously antistatist culture in which the specter of taxation evokes profound suspicion of government. Why are so many Americans so willing to comply with burdens they claim to regard as unfair or tyrannical? Perhaps the vaunted antistatism of American political culture is largely pretense, or pretext—and the pervasive discourse of tax resentment and rebellion in the United States is not always really about taxes.