Tax exposure and political preferences

Abstract How do people form preferences over tax policy proposals? This article introduces the concept of tax exposure to explain the determinants of tax preferences. Moving beyond traditional models that link attitudes to taxation in a linear fashion to income or wealth, we argue that preferences are often discontinuous or non-linear around tax thresholds. Furthermore, tax preferences are shaped by both contextual factors, such as the prevailing tax environment and its implications for personal exposure to tax changes, and the partisan context, which informs expectations about the trajectory of future taxation. We test these arguments using three complementary datasets: a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom (2021), a survey of US tax preferences in the context of the 2018 Trump tax bill, and a cross-national dataset covering 30 countries from 1985 to 2017. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of tax exposure in structuring individual and contextual variation in tax policy preferences.