The willingness to engage in costly punishment of free riders (prosocial punishment) is crucial to foster group cooperation and understand public goods provision. While prosocial punishment is common across societies, its motivations remain unclear. Scholars have suggested that people resist inequitable outcomes and willingly bear costs to sanction free riders, seeking a fairer distribution of payoffs. This study tests a key implication of such fairness-driven arguments: if inequality aversion drives prosocial punishment, individuals should punish less when redistribution occurs, as equality concerns would be already satisfied. We conducted a pre-registered 2x2 between-subjects lab experiment (N=320), where participants completed a Social Value Orientation (SVO) task and played a one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG) with a Punishment Stage. We manipulated endowment inequality and the presence of redistributive taxation. Pre-registered analyses show that (1) inequality aversion does not predict prosocial punishment; (2) punishment levels do not significantly differ across treatments. However, exploratory results suggest that under high inequality, redistribution reduces the intensity of punishment towards richer individuals. This could indicate that inequality aversion triggers prosocial punishment only at acute inequality levels.

The building of an efficient fiscal apparatus is crucial in explaining how states in the twentieth century were able to finance increasingly costly infrastructure projects, public-funded education, and welfare provision. Fiscal capacity is commonly explained as the outcome of war or democratization. But in many episodes of state-building both these factors were absent. In order to study the politics of authoritarian state-building, we examine the case of Chile, arguably the most significant example of fiscal modernization in Latin America, utilizing a unique data set comprising financial and personnel information from the Chilean Ministry of Finance, administrative and fiscal reforms in the Ministries of Finance and Internal Affairs, in addition to details of the backgrounds of government ministers. Our preliminary findings suggest that the capacity of modernizing coalitions to monitor the implementation of reform and negate the veto power of traditional elites is critical to understand state building in a context of a non-democratic political system.

This paper is concerned with state capacity and autocrat survival. We argue that state strength in autocracies increases leader tenure but reduces the stability of the regime itself; stronger autocracies run a higher risk of transitioning to democracy. This trade-off arises as a result of how state capacity affects the behavior of elite challengers. A stronger state reduces the likelihood of the ruler being ousted by force, inducing rival elites to switch tactics to peaceful support for democracy. An autocrat may prolong his tenure by investing in state capacity, but this brings on the downfall of the autocratic regime itself. We analyze the implications of our argument using a variety of historical sources providing information on 47 autocracies from 1800 to 2012. Our empirical findings, in part based on original data collection, are in line with the theoretical expectations: in strong states autocrats survive, but autocracies die.

Fiscal capacity is regularly linked to warfare and democratization. However, the majority of income taxes-a cornerstone of government finance-were introduced by non-democratic states in peacetime. This paper is concerned with how autocratic politics shape the adoption and expansion of income taxes. Political institutions help overcome a commitment problem related to investments in taxation. To avoid being deposed by his or her elite supporters, a ruler needs to guarantee that new taxes will not be used opportunistically (e.g. expropriating the elite). If the elite supporters can effectively monitor the government, any transgressions will be detected and punishable. Institutions such as legislatures solve this commitment problem when they allow oversight and monitoring over the executive branch. The empirical implications are straightforward: in places with strong institutional oversight, which allows the elite to monitor the executive, we should observe higher fiscal capacity. I find support for this by analyzing newly available historical datasets over tax revenues, tax introduction dates, and political institutions.

The chapter analyses the link between political institutions and the adoption of income taxes. The main claim is that this link differs across different types of income tax. The personal income tax represents primarily an investment in fiscal capacity. Hence, its introduction depends crucially on political institutions that constrain executive power. The corporate income tax, by contrast, falls more heavily on the rich. As a consequence, its adoption depends critically on democratic institutions that allow for broad political participation. The chapter explores these predictions for a global sample of countries. The results support the contention that executive constraints facilitate personal income tax adoption, while corporate income taxes are more likely to be adopted by cou© Oxford University Press 2022. All rights reserved.