TAXING CLIENTS: THE POLITICS OF LOCAL TAXATION IN BENIN
Sanata Sy-Sahande
A DISSERTATION
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY
OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY
THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS
Adviser: Leonard Wantchekon
June 2019
© Copyright by Sanata Sy-Sahande, 2019. All rights reserved.
iii
Dissertation Abstract
Developing countries often lack the strong state apparatus necessary to detect, punish, and deter
tax evasion. Given their limited capacity for coercion, how can they convince their citizens to
pay the taxes needed to fund critical public services? This dissertation shows how the reliance on
clientelism (the promise of targeted goods in exchange for political support) constrains leaders’
ability to convince citizens to pay taxes. My setting is a sample of cities in Benin, a clientelist
West African democracy that struggles to collect municipal tax revenue from its citizens. Across
these cities, I find that when politicians promise to reward citizens for their votes, they create real
expectations for differential treatment after elections: those who voted for the winning mayoral
candidate expect to be favored, while those who did not vote for the mayor expect neglect. These
political expectations encourage mayor supporters to pay more in taxes, while non-supporters
prefer to withhold payments. However, politicians cannot capitalize on the positive expectations
of their supporters because these voters also expect to be shielded from the consequences of tax
evasion. I use survey analysis, experimental evidence, and qualitative interviews with
bureaucrats, elected officials, and tax collectors in Benin to show that overreliance on clientelism
as a winning electoral strategy constrains political elites’ ability to implement and enforce tax
policy.
iv
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: A clientelist theory of taxation and compliance .......................................................... 34
Chapter 3: Clientelism as a source of tax norms........................................................................... 64
Chapter 4: Views from the State ................................................................................................. 111
Chapter 5: Sites of Resistance..................................................................................................... 127
Chapter 6: Conclusion................................................................................................................. 153
v
List of Tables and Figures
Figures
1.1 -- 7
1.2 -- 8
1.3 -- 8
1.4 -- 10
1.5 -- 10
3.1 -- 86
3.2 -- 89
3.3 -- 94
3.4 -- 98
3.5 – 103
5.1 -- 140
5.2 -- 140
5.3 -- 143
5.4 -- 143
5.5 -- 145
Chapter 3 Tables and Figures -- 172
Tables
Table 2.1 -- 54
Table 3.1 -- 75
Table 3.6 -- 95
Table 4.1 -- 122
Table 4.2 -- 123
Table 4.3 -- 124
Table 4.4 -- 125
Table 5.1 -- 136
Table 5.2 -- 139
Table 5.4 -- 149
Table 5.5 -- 149
vi
Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank my advisors Chris Achen, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Rory Truex, Leonard
Wantchekon, and Jennifer Widner for their guidance and mentorship as I worked on the
dissertation. They inspired me think big and to own my ideas as a scholar. I am grateful to
everyone who read and commented on different parts of the project. I benefitted from the
collegial environment of Princeton’s Politics department, where fellow graduate students and
faculty, including Amaney Jamal and Helen Milner, offered critical feedback on the project at
various stages. Among students, I would especially like to thank Romain Ferrali, Dela Kpo, and
Giuliana Pardelli for the many draft workshops and energizing discussions that sparked my
creativity. Outside of the department, I benefited from a wider network of African politics
scholars including Marlette Jackson, Lucy Martin, and Pia Raffler, who offered sharp insights
that ultimately improved my work. My fieldwork would not have been possible without the
generous help of Romualde Anago, Andre Gueguehoun, Clement Litchegbe of the Institute for
Empirical Research in Political Economy (IREEP), where I spent the majority of my time in
Benin. I am also grateful for funding provided by the Bobst Center for Peace Research, the
Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Princeton Program in African
Studies. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for supporting me and encouraging me to keep
going during my most difficult moments.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Motivating Case: Clientelism and Public Goods
In Ouidah, a medium-sized city just outside of Cotonou, Benin, a chef
d’arrondissement, or district councilor, decries the lack of resources in his district. “They
take us for social workers,” he says of his constituents, who come to him for all manner
of favors. While many of the requests are personal, such as a request for school fees or a
signed administrative form, constituents also demand his attention to public concerns
such as sanitation issues, dilapidated classrooms, and security concerns. Yet, he laments,
when it comes time to talk to them about paying the taxes that will fund these services,
“they are unyielding.” If it were up to him, he would much rather be able to provide items
that would benefit the whole community in order to reduce his load of clients. He insists,
however, that “if it’s within our means, we try to help. But they know themselves that
there are no resources. It’s the same thing across all 10 districts [in this municipality].”
The district councilor is not wrong about citizens’ resistances to taxes. Citing aid
from foreign agencies and NGOs, some residents in the neighboring capital city reckon
that their local government has enough funds from other sources of revenue. The most
common reason offered was poverty. “People are suffering,” one shopkeeper protested,
“why ask them to pay when we cannot even sell enough to survive?” Other salient
reasons for not paying ranged from perceived corruption expressed via expectations that
“they will just pocket the money,” to the impression that politicians are able to use their
own funds to finance campaigns and redistribute goods to their supporters.
2
The conflicting accounts of the district councilor and municipal residents highlight a
central tension between citizens’ expectations to receive particularistic goods in exchange
for their votes, referred to as clientelism1, and the need to fund public goods through
public revenue.
Faced with this dilemma, existing theories of clientelism predict that politicians
prefer targeted transfers at the expense of public goods provision. This choice drives the
negative relationship we observe between clientelism and public goods provision in
developing countries: countries with leaders who rely on targeted goods for votes tend to
provide fewer public goods and services (Khemani 2015, Keefer and Vlaicu 2007,
Larreguy 2013, Wantchekon 2003).2
Most accounts have attributed this phenomenon to politicians’ preferences and
incentives. That is, politicians choose patronage because it is politically expedient in
maintaining a minimum winning coalition, eschewing the need to engage in costly public
goods provision for the entire electorate (Lindbeck and Weibull 1987; Dixit and
Londregan 1996).
1 I use Kitschelt and Wilkinson’s (2007, p.2) definition of clientelism: “clientelist accountability
represents a transaction, the direct exchange of a citizen's vote in return for direct payments or
continuing access to employment, goods, and services.” 2 Keefer and Vlaicu (2007) present theoretical claims about the relationship between clientelism
and public goods, arguing that politicians lacking credibility will rely on targeted rather than
public transfers. This tradeoff is illustrated in Wantchekon (2003), who measures politicians’
choice of clientelist or universal electoral appeals. Further claims come from Kitschelt and
Wilkinson (2007), who predict that as countries develop they will offer less clientelist and more
universal public goods as the former rises in cost. Cross-national evidence of the relationship
comes from Khemani (2015), who presents a negative correlation between vote buying and health
outcomes; while Larreguy (2013) provides evidence that the supply of schooling is lower in areas
under greater clientelist party control in Mexico.
3
However, a growing literature sees clientelist politicians as constrained by these
strategies. There is evidence that they would prefer to exit clientelist contracts but cannot
given bottom-up pressures to keep them in place (Lindberg 2010). As the opening
example illustrates, citizens are often empowered in these exchanges to make demands
that politicians find harder and harder to fulfill (Nichter and Peress 2017). These
conflicting views complicate the straightforward relationship we have previously
observed between patronage and public goods: do clientelist politicians choose to
withhold spending on public goods, or might they be constrained in their ability to do so?
I take a constraint-based approach and offer one mechanism that helps explain the
negative relationship between clientelism and public goods provision. While existing
research has tended to study the two opening examples in isolation, I propose that the
instances of clientelist request fulfillment and citizen resistance to taxes are intimately
connected. Reliance on the former encourages the latter by reducing citizens’ incentives
to pay taxes. Even if politicians want to spend more on public services, their clientelist
practices constrain their ability to convince citizens to pay the taxes that will fund them.
Taxation in Developing Countries
The scholarly conversation around public goods provision in developing
countries rarely addresses the need for its sustainable funding through public revenue.
However, this is a big topic among development practitioners. Development
organizations have begun to prioritize domestic resource mobilization in host countries,
resulting in initiatives by leading agencies such as the World Bank, the United Nations,
4
and the OECD to build tax capacity.3 The goals of reducing reliance on foreign aid and
strengthening domestic resource mobilization have become central to the mission of
international financial institutions. Official statements from the OECD stress that
“Effective taxation is…crucial to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.”4 The
Platform for Collaboration on Tax (PCT), created in 2016, formalized this sentiment by
coordinating efforts to increase tax capacity in developing countries across the various
aid organizations. These resolutions signal a welcome change from politics as usual in the
development aid community, which is riddled with problems of perverse incentives and
ineffectiveness (Deaton 2013, Briggs 2017). While few governments fund 100 percent of
their budget from taxation, the goal is to increase this percentage as much as possible.
Such a change would indicate that local governments in Africa are increasingly relying
on taxation to fund their budgets, as opposed to federal transfers or international donors.
Taxation presents an ideal context to study the role of political constraints as
opposed to political choice because country leaders are already incentivized to pursue tax
collection. They face exogenous international pressure from donors, who have intensified
their critiques and calls for limits on aid. They also face mounting domestic pressure to
provide for growing cities and populations. Despite this growing pressure, developing
countries still exhibit weak tax capacity, or the ability to extract, regulate, and manage
revenue through a competent bureaucracy in order to fund public spending.
3 Initiatives include the 2018 Platform for Collaboration on Tax co-founded by the World Bank,
the United Nations, and OECD countries, where the UN has explicitly tied improvement of
domestic resource mobilization to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). 4 http://www.oecd.org/tax/countries-must-strengthen-tax-systems-to-meet-sustainable-
development-goals.htm
5
As a central function of the state, tax capacity captures both the state’s ability to
enforce rules, and citizens’ willingness to abide by them. By this measure, developing
countries fall especially short. They have tax revenue to GDP ratios that are 20 to 30
percent less than those of high-income countries (Besley and Persson, 2014). This issue is
especially relevant in Africa, where “shadow economies” comprise up to 75% of national
GDP (Schneider and Enste 2000), indicating that large swaths of these countries’
populations manage to evade taxation. This issue is exacerbated by a widespread pattern
of decentralization in developing countries. At the behest of the international
development community, many countries have moved to devolve power and fiscal
authority to local governments (Bardhan 2002). This trend raises questions about the
preparedness of these new local entities to take up the herculean task of taxation.
Taxation in Benin by the Numbers
Benin is a prime example of a developing country that is simultaneously
experiencing all of the above trends. It is classified as a low-income country with a GDP
of 8.5 billion USD and a population of 11 million. While the country is among top
performers in sub-Saharan Africa for its GDP-tax ratio at 15 percent, it especially
struggles to mobilize local revenue, which generally does not pass 1 percent of national
GDP.5 In response, Benin has been host to various tax initiatives from major financial
institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.
With respect to devolution, a decentralization law was passed in 1999 giving
power to newly created local governments to tax their residents. Prior to the law, local
5 Source: CONAFIL, Benin; Benjamin and Mbaye 2012
6
governments were run by the central government in a hierarchical bureaucracy. These
local governments, or communes, became independent in 2003, with the elections of
mayors and local councils across the 77 municipalities. The entities are now responsible
for infrastructure, primary education, health, economic services and investments, and the
environment.
This study examines the period 2003-2016, covering the first three electoral
mandates of newly created local governments to understand how they respond to the
challenges of directly taxing their populations via property and business taxes, market
fees, agricultural taxes, and the like. While most studies of tax capacity stop at tax
revenue to GDP ratios, I am most interested in these governments’ sustainability and their
ability to fund public goods from tax revenue. To do so, I evaluate Benin’s capacity to
collect taxes along two dimensions: the ability of its local governments to raise enough to
fund basic administrative functions, and their ability to contribute to public spending,
using locally generated tax revenue.
Figure 1.1 shows the progress Beninese municipalities have made since their
first administrations were formed in 20036. It reports the average amount of revenue
collected (in millions of USD) across all 77 municipalities. It shows a promising increase,
as revenue nearly doubled from a total of $2.8 million in 2003 to a total of $5.5 million in
2014.
6 Revenue is collected by two actors: central state tax collectors deployed to municipalities but
answer to the Ministry of Finance, and local tax collectors who answer to the mayor.
7
We see however that the tax process has been highly vulnerable to politicization, as
evidenced by pronounced drops in revenue around election times.7 For instance,
presidential elections were held in 2006, where we see a precipitous drop in revenue
collected. This figure presents the first piece of evidence of the depressive role that
political strategy might play on tax collection in Benin.
Sustainable Taxation
In addition to total revenue, it is informative to know how far the revenue
collected can go to cover local government expenditures. The greater the deficit between
revenue and spending, the less governments depend on taxes to fund their activities.
Figure 1.2 illustrates this deficit, showing that around 2008, local government
expenditures started to grow at a much faster rate than revenue.8 By 2015, local
7 Local elections were planned in 2013, but were delayed until 2015. 8 Here, I use CONAFIL data for 71 municipalities from 2003-2015, with the years 2004-2007
denoted as an average for that period.
Figure 1.1 Annual sum of tax revenue collected for
all 77 communes. Source: Direction Générale des
Impôts
8
governments were spending twice as much they collected, for a revenue-to-spending ratio
of about 0.5.
In Figure 1.3, I counted the number of municipalities that could feasibly collect
enough tax revenue to cover their operating costs to be able to invest the surplus towards
public services. The figure shows that this number was low to begin with in 2003 at about
30 percent, but it has steadily declined to about 10 percent as municipalities are unable to
keep up with the rising expenditures displayed in Figure 1.2. On average, the tax revenue
collected is often not enough to cover these basic administrative expenses, let alone
address the demands of growing populations especially in urban areas. Such trends fuel
perceptions among citizens that tax revenue only serves to benefit local administrations.9
9 More on this below in the section on citizen attitudes, and in the next chapter.
Figure 1.2. Annual sum of tax
revenue and spending for 71
communes. Source: CONAFIL
Figure 1.3. Annual proportion of
communes able to cover their
administrative costs. Source: CONAFIL
9
Revenue to Public Spending
The gains in total tax revenue collected become even more modest when we
consider municipalities’ capacity to fund public services with the revenue they collect. As
established in Figure 3 above, at most only about a third of municipalities are able to fund
their administrative costs purely from tax revenue in any given year, leaving two-thirds
without the ability to contribute to public spending.
Most local governments overcome these constraints by relying on central
government transfers for both operating costs and public spending. Figure 1.410 shows
the breakdown of their available sources of funding, from the inception of local
governments in 2003, to 2015. We can see that tax revenue made up the bulk of
municipal revenue sources in the early years (2003-2007), but that government transfers
increased dramatically from 2008 onward.11 Accordingly, the share of revenue coming
from taxes remains sizeable but has dropped drastically over this time period. This shows
local governments’ dependency on central transfers to execute their budgets. It is
precisely this dynamic that the international development organizations would like to
address.
10 Note on first figure: does not add up to 100 because of missing data. Note on second figure:
adds up to over 100 because some communes spent less than their available funds on public
services. 11 2008 was the year of the second political administration (mayor and council), as municipal
elections are held every 5 years. The low amount of central government transfers in the early
years may simply reflect the fact that the communes were newly created.
10
The situation is even more bleak when we look at the distribution of sources for
public spending specifically12. Figure 1.5 shows how much tax revenue the average
municipality has to contribute to public spending after paying its operating costs. While
this amount made up on average about 35-45 percent of public spending in early years
(pre-2008), it has decreased dramatically to about 20 percent on average in 2015.
12 For Figure 5, I calculated the average relative contribution of each source of revenue (government
transfers, NGO transfers, and tax revenue) to fund public expenditures in a given year. The amount that
municipalities have available to contribute is a function of their administrative costs. The greater the
surplus after covering these costs, the more they can allocate towards public spending. Although many
municipalities do no raise enough tax revenue to cover administrative costs, they receive external transfers
to help pay their bills. These transfers in turn free up some tax revenue for governments to use for public
services.
Figure 1.4. Relative contributions of government
and NGO subsidies and tax revenue to local
budgets. Source: CONAFIL
Figure 1.5. Relative contributions of government
and NGO subsidies and tax revenue to public
spending. Source: CONAFIL
11
Meanwhile, the share of central government transfers to public spending has ballooned as
public spending has also increased steadily over the years (see Figure 1.2).
Ideally, public goods would be funded all or mostly from tax revenue. This is
what forms the basis of the fiscal contract as is defined from the historical experiences of
Western democracies (Levi 1989; Tilly 1990). Citizens of these early states accepted to
pay taxes with the assurance that their payments would go towards funding public
services. When governments do not depend on revenue to provide public services,
scholars have predicted variants of a “resource curse” wherein governments have less
incentives to be responsive to their citizens (Ross 1999). In the case of local governments
in Benin, we see that tax revenue funds on average less than 20 percent of public
spending, while the rest funded by central government and NGO transfers. This is a cause
for concern if we believe that the conditions of the fiscal contract must hold in order for
societies to reap the positive accountability and governance benefits associated with
taxation.
A look at local budgets in Benin shows how local governments in Benin have
taken up the challenges of devolution and fiscal autonomy. By several indicators, they
have struggled to do so. The data also show the strides that must be made to get local
governments to the point of self-sufficiency This effort will only be successful to the
extent that they widen the tax base (convince more people to pay), increase revenue
(convince the same people to pay more), or both. These efforts will depend on persuading
the general public to contribute to taxation. Thus, looking at state-society linkages and
the extent to which they help or hinder the state’s ability to convince its citizens to pay is
a pressing issue to address.
12
Citizen resistance
Public responses to state efforts to tax have been largely negative. The 2011
Afrobarometer Round 5 Survey reveals that 43 percent of Beninese citizens find it wrong
but understandable to refuse to pay local taxes and fees. Another third of respondents say
they would refuse to pay taxes if they could. This trend is echoed across the continent, as
36 percent find it wrong but understandable to not pay tax, and 17 percent state they
would refuse to pay if they could.
Widespread reticence to paying taxes is understandable given general
dissatisfaction with the services local governments provide and wide perceptions of a
corrupt tax collection process. Citizens have reason to be concerned, as public corruption
scandals involving local administrations have recently made national news. In a
particularly egregious example in Ouidah, the Director General of the tax department and
half-brother of the mayor was imprisoned after steadily siphoning 134 million CFA from
municipal tax revenue.13 In Porto-Novo, the Prefecture (the central government
department that oversees municipal affairs via regional branches) uncovered a missing
300 million CFA from tax revenue.14 It is no wonder, then, that Benin’s Afrobarometer
survey reports that 70 percent stated their local government handle local markets badly or
fairly badly; and 42 percent think most or all of their local politicians are corrupt.
13 Malgré l’échec de sa destitution, Sévérin Adjovi acculé. (2017, February 2017), Le Matinal. Retrieved
from http://quotidien-lematinal.info/malgre-lechec-de-sa-destitutionseverin-adjovi-accule/ 14 300 millions détournés à la mairie de Porto-Novo: François Ahlonsou dénonce un complot contre le Prd.
(2017, August 29), Le Matinal. Retrieved from http://quotidien-lematinal.info/00-millions-detournes-a-la-
maire-de-porto-novo-francois-ahlonsou-denonce-un-complot-contre-le-prd/
13
As it stands, bureaucratic and elected officials have a difficult time convincing
residents to pay. This problem is exacerbated by a large informal sector that employs 90-
95 percent of the labor force (Benjamin 2012). Informal entrepreneurs can be highly
mobile (moving from market to market) and can easily escape tax authorities by refusing
to formally register their businesses. Clearly, Beninese local authorities face taxable
populations with many exit options. Given limited capacity in terms of resources and
personnel, it is all the more imperative for municipalities to rely on persuasion to get
citizens to pay, as their capacity for deterrence via punishment is compromised.
This last point is a major point of difference between the literature on taxation
in western democracies and that of the developing world: developing countries often lack
the strong state apparatus to detect, punish, and deter tax evasion. This reality raises the
question: how can developing countries convince their citizens to pay taxes given limited
capacity for coercion? This dissertation responds by looking at features of state-society
political linkages in these countries to understand how clientelism tempers the state’s
persuasion power.
Before offering my response, I go over two commonly proposed solutions to
this coercion problem. The response from international agencies and government actors
has been to shore up technical capacity and to launch information campaigns to educate
the public on the benefits of paying taxes. In Benin, efforts to improve tax capacity have
included a World Bank initiative to formally register informal firms (Benhassine et al
2018) along with the provision of administrative assistance to local bureaucracies.
A notable aid donor has been the German Development Institute (GIZ), which
has promoted both tax capacity initiatives and civic discussions as part of larger efforts to
14
improve local governance in 25 of the country’s municipalities (Gross 2018). I spoke
with bureaucratic representatives of two municipalities, Toffo and So-Ava, that benefited
from the interventions15. In addition to interviews and focus groups with these and other
local actors, I consulted local newspapers and spoke with GIZ representatives, including
the country office director and two lead project managers. I offer a brief overview of how
each type of solution has operated in Benin.
Civic Awareness of Benefits
The public awareness argument reasons that if only citizens understood the
value of taxation, they would be more willing to pay. In theory, individuals who view
paying taxes as a civic duty are thought to be more likely to pay (Torgler et al 2008). This
view is also supported by fiscal exchange theories, which predict that citizens are more
likely to pay when they can see the public services provided from taxation (Levi 1988).
In practice, this reasoning shows up in platitudes offered by all types of actors in Benin.
It is widely expressed in interviews with local bureaucrats. According to the
Director of Tax Revenue of Cotonou, “the biggest problem is a lack of civic-
mindedness—people refuse to pay. We need to raise awareness, and politicians need to
explain the importance of paying tax. Otherwise, nothing will be fixed” (Personal
Interview, Regisseur Cotonou, 052215). The Secretary General of Toffo adds, “people
don’t understand decentralization. They think the municipality will help them with their
15 The municipalities are both in the southernmost Atlantique region of the country, 80km and 29
km from Cotonou, respectively
15
problems, not burden them with more charges. Collection becomes an activity meant to
steal from them” (Personal Interview, SG Toffo, 060115).
The sentiment is also shared among politicians. For instance, in a recent speech
to his constituents in the southern municipality of Zogbodomey, the mayor implored
residents to pay taxes, linking revenue directly to development.16 The speech was part of
a broader tax information campaign held by city hall to address tax evasion. Such
political campaigns are quite common. In other instances, mayors and local councilors
visit public markets and bus depots, promising to use revenue to install market stalls, fix
roads, and clean streets.17
Finally, this view has been adopted by the German Development Institute, which
has sought to increase citizen participation in local government via public accountability
hearings on municipal activities among other initiatives. The GIZ describes these
hearings as “a chance for direct dialogue between municipal authorities and citizens and
gives citizens the opportunity to ask questions, to raise complaints, or provide
recommendations on how to solve particular situations” (Gross 2018, p. 30). Citizens also
receive information about the municipal budget and how tax revenue was spent at these
meetings. The GIZ reports these hearings to have been largely successful in partner
municipalities that received a lot of training, describing the hearings as professional
settings for open and inclusive dialogue, drawing in on average 90-200 participants.
16 1ère édition de la journée du civisme fiscal à Zogbodomey: Le maire paie ses impôts et donne l’exemple.
(2016, December 5), Le Matinal. Retrieved from http://quotidien-lematinal.info/1ere-edition-de-la-journee-
du-civisme-fiscal-a-zogbodomey-le-maire-paie-ses-impots-et-donne-lexemple/ 17 Libération des artères publiques à Sèmè-Podji : Charlemagne Honfo s’enquiert des difficultés de ses
administrés. (2017, April 24), Le Matinal. Retrieved from http://quotidien-lematinal.info/deguerpissement-
des-arteres-publiques-a-seme-podji-charlemagne-honfo-senquiert-des-difficultes-de-ses-administres/
16
While tax administrators did frequent praise the accountability hearings, there were some
notable detractors. The Secretary General of Toffo, a partner municipality, says:
“We had informational campaigns with the help of GIZ. We also had a public
accountability hearing. These steps didn’t work. People tell what was discussed
during the sessions to politicians and local leaders of the community who are
against taxation. These individuals encourage the people not to pay…and the
population is pulled in different directions.”18
The Secretary’s testimony suggests that, while there is great positive potential for public
awareness campaigns and outreach (which also included radio announcements, public
criers, and municipal boards), there is also much room for elite capture by politically
motivated actors that remain unaddressed.
The narrative that uneducated citizens simply do not understand the purpose or
merit of taxation is also questionable. Beninese citizens can and do make the connection
between taxation and public services. Like many developing countries without a digitized
tax system, tax collection in Benin is a distinctly spatial, visible, and interactive process
relevant to Beninese citizens' everyday lives, even if they are not personally affected.
Unlike taxes on small or large enterprises, the taxes in this study concern average
residents: 63 percent of Afrobarometer respondents reported having to pay local taxes
and fees in 2012, and 60 percent for property taxes. Unlike value added taxes or
agricultural taxes, they are direct taxes imposed on citizens that local government
officials must collect in person. These characteristics make taxation—and the fiscal
exchange of tax for services it entails—salient and relevant to the average citizen. This
18 The technical report evaluating the effectiveness of the hearings confirms the interview, citing “some
interview partners described situations where RDCs were felt to be “hijacked” by political opposition
parties to expose the mayor (Natitingou) or by government parties to silence criticism (Toffo, Kérou)” (Gross 2018, p.34).
17
awareness is confirmed in Afrobarometer surveys. Although Beninese citizens are
generally unhappy with the quality of their local public services, a significant portion (56
percent) express willingness to pay more in taxes for more services, indicating at the very
least a willingness to enter into a fiscal contract with their local governments.
The fact that citizens express resistance to paying taxes despite understanding
the civic benefits suggest that they are conditional taxpayers—they are willing to pay
only when they find both promises to benefit and threats of punishment credible. Given
low provision of services and pervasive evasion, it seems that it is the promises
developing country governments make that are not credible. The World Bank’s Global
Tax Program has increasingly championed the role of government trust building in efforts
to encourage tax compliance and build popular support for taxation (Innovations in Tax
Compliance). The likelihood that civic awareness campaigns reduce this lack of trust is
low, especially since they seldom address directly the public’s reservations about
credibility.
State capacity to enforce costs
The second often-cited reason developing countries struggle to convince people to
pay taxes is their low state capacity. Limited state capacity for enforcement undoubtedly
plays a role in reducing tax collection—many municipalities simply lack the funds and
the workforce to credibly enforce. In interviews and focus groups, tax bureaucrats
regularly cited inadequate transportation19 and funds for fuel to get tax collectors where
19 For example, the Secretary General of So-Ava, a municipality built entirely on a lagoon,
recounts how he does not have enough boats to tax merchants on the water (Personal interview,
060115).
18
they need to be. Many of Benin’s municipalities still do not have digitized tax registries,
which makes monitoring liable taxpayers much more difficult. The result, says a tax
administrator, is that “you visit a property and the person has bills dating back years, all
unpaid” (Focus Group 0515). Although vendors and property owners can and do face
very public consequences for not paying20, the majority manage to avoid consequences or
remain undetected.
In response, the GIZ has also been working with municipalities to shore up their
tax capacity and alleviate some of these issues. They have provided technical assistance
to local administrations in the form of consulting, budget management, access to vehicles
for transportation, and logistical software that has helped municipalities register
taxpayers and estimate tax potential. Technocrats have heartily welcomed this technical
aid. One focus group respondent explains:
“Most municipalities cannot even tell the potential they have to generate a given
amount of revenue. It could be that they’re capable of raising 1 billion CFA, but if
they only collect 1 million, it means that we’re not performing and that we didn’t
do anything…Little by little, the GIZ has helped us to do this.”
Existing research has indeed showed that increasing either the real or perceived capacity
of the state to monitor and pursue tax evaders has a positive effect on compliance in
developing countries (Castro and Scartascini 2013, Pomeranz 2015). We see some of the
same positive returns happening in Benin too. According to the GIZ, the 25 partner
20 Collectors can close and lock down shops, reclaim merchandise, or call in police for
reinforcement. It is not uncommon to see shuttered businesses with a note from the tax
department on them.
19
municipalities that have benefited from its tax capacity intervention saw their revenue
from municipal taxes increase by 20 percent from 2010 to 2013 (Gross 2018).
However, the promising advancements in helping municipalities to identify and
pursue taxpayers seem to have their own limitations. In a personal interview, the
Secretary General of the municipality of So-Ava explains the disappointing results after a
successful GIZ intervention this way:
“With the help of GIZ in 2011, we were able to formally register taxpayers. They
started to pay their bills, but the mobilization didn’t work too well. After the first
time they paid, they expected to see results (for example, only 2 out of the 42
villages in So-Ava have electricity). But they didn’t see anything, which
discouraged them. It made it so that, in 2013, out of the 12 million [CFA] we
were supposed to collect, we only got 3 million.”
The increase in technical capacity was not able to make up for poor service provision that
discouraged tax payments. It also calls into question its ability to generate sustained
change, as citizen responses to increases in capacity may taper off over time.
While these enforcement limitations are more pronounced in poorer countries,
they are still very much present in developed countries. In the U.S. for instance, the fact
that the IRS has a 70,000 strong workforce and sophisticated tools to monitor and detect
fraud21 —and therefore pose a credible threat of enforcement—is not enough to ensure
total compliance. The agency still reports a tax gap of $458 billion for 2008-2010, and an
81.7 percent voluntary compliance rate for that same period22.
21 Source: www.irs.gov/statistics 22 Source: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/the-tax-gap
20
This point has been raised by scholars who have noted that state capacity to
enforce and punish noncompliers is not enough to incite the voluntary aspect of
compliance and may actually backfire if the state response is too strong (Andreoni et al
1998; Fjeldstad 2001). Guided by a view of taxation as a social contract between state
and citizen that is only partly upheld by threat of punishment, these scholars have focused
on the compliance decision as one of tax morale, or the willingness to pay tax (Torgler
2002). Non-enforcement explanations have highlighted the importance of fairness of
procedural and distributive outcomes, trust in government, and social norms in
influencing the willingness to pay.
Because capacity arguments tend to focus almost exclusively on the capacity to
enforce or deter, they can only partly explain compliance. We must turn to different
mechanisms to explain the ability to persuade people to voluntary comply with taxes.
Theory: Clientelism, persuasion, and enforcement
The case of Benin shows the limitations of two common approaches to
convincing citizens to pay taxes. Most citizens understand the positive returns to taxation
and generally express pro-tax norms, indicating that it is the credibility, rather than the
content, of tax awareness campaigns that are at issue. Strengthening state capacity to
collect taxes has somewhat improved revenue and efficiency, but has inherent limitations
given the quasi-voluntary nature of taxation.
In contrast, I put politics front and center to consider the role that clientelism
plays in producing the two outcomes we observe in Benin: low tax capacity and
widespread citizen resistance to paying taxes. Benin is known for its clientelist practices,
21
which have been well documented over time. Banégas (1998, 2003) offers detailed
accounts of the practice of selling votes in Benin, from the perspective of both citizens
and politicians. Wantchekon (2003) provides evidence of the success of clientelist
strategies in parliamentary elections in Benin, where voters tend to prefer candidates with
clientelist messages. More recently, Koter (2013) has noted the links between clientelism
and Benin’s ethno-regional social structure.
The country’s setting also satisfies key conditions to be able to hold state capacity
constant at the local level because of decentralization. Each municipality represents a
microcosm where politicians (especially the mayor) enjoy a great deal of discretion in
taxing and spending. This means that citizens are clearly able to link local government
taxation activities to its provision of public goods. Holding state capacity constant in
these smaller local units allows us to study variation in political factors, especially the
extent of and capacity for clientelism to operate.
In a setting where clientelism is prevalent, I argue that client status—whether an
individual or community is in good standing to receive or demand particular benefits
from an elected official—becomes a reliable heuristic that citizens use to predict their
likely losses or gains from government redistributive policies. This occurs even when
clientelist appeals are not intended to extend to programmatic or substantive policy. In
regard to taxation, a major redistributive policy, client status affects citizens’ perceived
likelihood of both benefiting from taxation and incurring costly punishment from evading
taxes. I present two mechanisms through which clientelism affects either the real or
perceived distribution of costs and benefits.
22
Distribution of benefits. Client status gives citizens informative signals about
how tax-funded services will be distributed. It reinforces citizens’ beliefs that those who
voted for the incumbent will be better off than those who did not. I further add that it
makes citizens sensitive to the extent, and not just the direction of their vote, as they
believe the strength of their political support will be evaluated relative to those of other
constituents. Those who are uncertain of benefiting from tax revenue because they see
themselves as likely non-clients are therefore less willing to pay. On the other hand, those
with client status are more willing to pay because they find promises to benefit from it
more credible.
Distribution of costs. The ability of state leaders to impose a credible threat of
enforcement is eroded when those with client status believe that this capacity will not be
used against them personally. This helps to explain why, even when clients are more
confident that they will benefit tax revenue because of their status, they may still look to
evade taxes and expect exemptions from government. Therefore, governments are not
able to harness the positive effects among clients because they have reduced their
bargaining power to enforce regulations.
Due to a reliance on clientelist strategies, politicians face persuasion problems
among non-clients, and enforcement problems among clients. My theory helps to explain
why those who use clientelist strategies to influence voting behavior find it hard to elicit
compliance and enforcement tax laws, among both supporters and non-supporters.
23
Empirical Strategy
This project features a comparative, single-country study of the sub-regional units
of Benin, a developing West African country with weak state capacity and widespread
clientelist practices. As a country noted for its non-programmatic politics and lack of
political party platforms, it is also an ideal place to test whether citizens derive policy
implications from clientelist messages in the absence of policy debates. The mixed-
method project is primarily a study of political behavior. In it I examine the attitudes and
behaviors of urban Beninese residents in the country’s largest cities primarily captured
via survey evidence, experimental methods, and in-depth interviews. This choice
addresses the need to account for comparatively low and varying state capacity to tax in
rural areas, as well as the specific demands of growing cities to provide public services
facing influxes of rural to urban migration.
I take advantage of the political variation across Benin’s southern municipalities
to measure the effect of mayoral party dominance on citizens’ expectations to gain or lose
from the party in power. The key explanatory variable used throughout the project is the
real or perceived share of past votes for the mayor’s ruling party in a given municipality.
I argue that this measure is highly salient to municipal residents because it serves as a
heuristic to anticipate future redistribution of both private and local public goods. These
calculations in turn shape the willingness to support and to pay taxes.
To test this argument using observational survey evidence, I analyze how
sensitive individual refusal rates are to a neighborhood’s ruling party vote share. To test
the argument using experimental evidence, I manipulate respondents’ perceptions of their
community’s relative support for the ruling party, thereby controlling for substantive
24
differences in opposition and incumbent areas, to measure the effects on their
expectations for future redistribution and their willingness to support local taxation.
Firsthand accounts of government actors came from 16 interviews with local
brokers and civil society members, over 30 interviews with municipal bureaucrats and
elected officials, and 8 interviews with central government officials at the Ministry of
Finance. These semi-structured interviews provided valuable insights into the motivations
and calculations of state actors to compliment the survey evidence of citizen perspectives.
They also clarified how residents employ clientelist demands in their daily interactions
with tax collectors and other bureaucratic actors. I used a snow-ball sampling method to
obtain interviews, coupled with a series of interviews at the randomly selected locations
for the survey experiment.
Theoretical significance
My theoretical contribution is to challenge the way we think about the role
clientelism and its links to policy. The prevailing view is that there are no direct links as
studies of clientelism tend to take a myopic view of voters who are poor and uninformed
about policies beyond valence issues that are pro-development and anti-corruption
(Kitschelt 2000; Brusco et al 2004; Jensen and Justesen 2014). These assumptions mean
we have very little to say about African voters’ policy preferences because we simply
assume they do not exist, primarily because politicians do not provide policy platforms
(Bleck and van de Walle 2013; Fujiwara and Wantchekon 2013).
In contrast, I take a political economy approach to see voters as instrumental
actors using information about politician’s likely behavior to guide their decision to
25
contribute to the state, even in the absence of specific policy platforms on an issue. In the
course of determining how their client status will hurt or benefit them, they are also able
to infer the likely outcomes of redistributive policy, and form preferences for taxation
based on those expectations. As a result, clientelism as a mode of exchange that is
primarily dyadic and encourages individuals to think about the personal returns to their
vote actually becomes the basis for considerations of their broader community.
My theory also allows for a view of clientelist voters as strategic actors with
agency in spite of their client status. Taking this approach clarifies two key ways citizens
may exercise this agency: by constraining the behavior of elected officials and exercising
exit options to resist the state’s penetration of society.
Constrained politician behavior
Focusing on the demand side of clientelism, I make voter preferences endogenous
to politicians’ choices between public goods and clientelism. Politicians would prefer
using public money to give resources to everyone rather than face individualistic
pressures to give preferential treatment, often from their own pockets. But demands from
voters who are equally invested in keeping the status quo help to perpetuate the practice.
This explains why we observe clientelism’s persistence even as the practice becomes less
sustainable in the long run as voter demands grow. Further developing theory of
clientelism’s “perverse incentives” (Stokes 2005), I argue that citizens are essentially
engaging in positive behavior such as holding politicians accountable for unequal
redistribution and withholding tax payment for poor service, but for “perverse” reasons:
their political affiliation. This view is strongly supported by the state-society relations
26
literature, which argues that the set of choices available to developing country leaders are
constrained by the populations they govern. Precisely, when leaders take up
“patrimonial” authority (Weber 1978), they may unwittingly give over power to “strong
societies” (Migdal 1988). My theory suggests a view of citizens as having agency, in that
they consider policy priorities and have the power to influence politicians’ choices.
Political Participation and Exit Options
Clientelism determines the contents of the social contract between states and
citizens. The dominant view of taxation as a social contract rests on the fact that tax
compliance is a quasi-voluntary activity that requires citizens to accept the tax levying
authority of the state (Levi 1989). This contract is based on a system of fiscal exchange,
whereby citizens pay taxes in return for public goods and services from the state. I argue
that clientelism displaces this fiscal contract with another: an exchange of targeted goods
for votes. While the clientelist contract encourages some city residents to support and pay
taxes, it ultimately weakens local governments’ ability to persuade everyone and enforce
taxation widely because they cannot credibly commit to provide public, rather than
targeted, goods.
Clientelism disrupts the conditions required for taxation to breed political
accountability and participation. Chief among the supposed benefits of taxation is that it
encourages taxpayers to take a more active role in holding politicians accountable for
how they spend public revenue (Tilly 1992, Moore 2008). Rather than encouraging
participation, I find that clientelism encourages supporters to assign legitimacy to leaders
that assist them in evading state obligations, such as taxation (Ekeh 1975). Likewise,
27
among non-supporters, it discourages their participation because they see themselves as
less likely to benefit from taxation. Thus, taxation in clientelist contexts trigger exit
options for citizen clients and non-clients alike, leading them to disengage from the state
(Hirschman 1970) rather than participate in active bargaining with the state over the use
of tax revenue.
Given evidence that clientelism distorts these two tenets of state formation theory,
its relevance for limiting tax capacity by constraining leaders’ ability to collect taxes in
developing countries is clear. In the pages that follow I show how clientelist logic affects
each of these explanations, suggesting it is an explanation in its own right. In doing so, I
lay the grounds for a clientelism-taxation link that is so far underexplored, especially in
relation to other explanations for low tax capacity in developing countries such as weak
bureaucratic capacity and poor citizens.
Policy implications
If clientelism were simply a matter of politician choice, then we could address it
by altering their incentives to engage in it. I suggest, however, that clientelism persists in
part because citizens have adapted clientelist norms to a wide range of issue areas beyond
voting. The presence of citizen “buy-in” suggests that concerted efforts to confront and
change citizen expectations are necessary to combat the negative effects of clientelism. A
politician-centered scholarly and policy conversation precludes these efforts. Rather than
arguing against capacity arguments, I instead draw out ways these initiatives may fall
short if state and international actors do not directly confront the consequences of
clientelism.
28
If we acknowledge that citizens’ clientelist norms are persistent and wide-
reaching, this speaks to a broader discussion of the feasibility of development initiatives
set by external actors. Tax development initiatives that do not take into account citizens’
clientelist expectations are missing an important obstacle to their success. A purely state-
capacity approach to improving tax capacity in developing countries will be limited in
success, unless it addresses the clientelism-induced political attitudes and behaviors of
potential taxpayers.
A constraint view is consistent with other compliance problems where leaders fail
to enforce rules and regulations, ranging from vendor rights to property and housing
regulations and crime. In her study of bureaucratic politics in Palermo, Chubb (1981)
details how local party machines offer reprieve from administrative regulations to finance
clientelist mobilization when local public resources are scarce. More recently, Holland
(2015) shows how politicians acquiesce to poor constituents’ political demands by
“forbearance,” or their willingness to overlook squatting violations as a form of
redistribution. These examples speak to the constraints leaders face in their ability to
regulate and enforce laws more generally, of which taxation is but one case. Lack of
compliance on these dimensions is directly related to poor development outcomes, as it
interferes with governments’ ability to regulate economic activity. Therefore,
understanding how and why citizens of poor countries choose not to comply with formal
laws is an important step in designing better development policies.
Outline of Dissertation
The dissertation is organized as follows. In the theory chapter (Chapter 2), I
consider why a norm-driven, long-term view of clientelism and its effects on taxation
29
does not yet exist because of our priors on clientelism as short-term, informal
mobilization channels that primarily influence voting behavior and not programmatic
policy.
In my first empirical chapter, (Chapter 3), I use experimental evidence to show
how widespread and consistent clientelist norms are in Benin, and how citizens readily
adapt them to infer the skewed redistributive outcomes of tax policy. Those who do not
expect to be favored clients are especially discouraged from supporting taxes as they
expect to lose from redistribution.
In my second empirical chapter, (Chapter 5), I show how the adoption of
clientelist norms affects the bargaining power of state actors by empowering likely client
beneficiaries to refuse to pay taxes. My evidence comes from tax collector surveys and
interviews, analysis of geo-referenced Afrobarometer data showing variation in tax
behavior across space, and a second embedded survey experiment showing expectations
for less tax enforcement conditional on vote choice.
Taking Chapters 3 and 5 together, I show how clientelist challenges to state tax
capacity come from both supporters and non-supporters but via different mechanisms.
Likely non-clients withdraw their tolerance for taxation because they do not find
promises to redistribute revenue to their communities credible. Likely clients, while
generally more supportive of taxation, use their status as a bargaining chip to refuse their
tax obligations.
In Chapter 4, I share the qualitative interviews I conducted with mayors, local
elected officials like the district councilor in Ouidah, and local bureaucrats and tax
30
collectors that illustrate how they take clientelism into consideration when deciding how
and whether to enforce taxes.
Lastly, in the conclusion, I consider the scope conditions of my argument and end
with considerations for how to study the effects I have identified in Benin on a larger
scale, in other countries and contexts.
31
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34
Chapter 2: A clientelist theory of taxation and compliance
Many developing countries face compliance problems concerning the ability to
regulate and enforce laws. These shortcomings are reflected in issues related to crime,
informal street activity, slum proliferation, and weak property rights. They are
emblematic of a general violation of Migdal’s (1988) definition of capable states as
organizations that can get people to follow the rules they set. It also conflicts with
Weber’s definition of state authority, as “the probability that certain specific commands
(or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (Weber 1978, p.212).
There are many reasons why obtaining compliance may be difficult for new
states. In Africa especially, post-colonial leaders must contend with competing traditional
authority and social influences (Englebert 2000, Migdal 1988) and manage sparse
populations and difficult geography (Herbst 2000). Rather than investing in state capacity
building (a costly strategy), it is presumed that state leaders of developing countries
instead chose patrimonial strategies to compensate for deficiencies in formal state
authority23.
In this chapter, I illustrate how the clientelist environment found in many
developing country settings makes it difficult for governments to obtain compliance
using either strategy. Paradoxically, this occurs because government elites first chose to
use clientelism as a means to get political compliance. I show how these efforts
23 See for example Keefer and Vlaicu (2008), who argue that leaders of young democracies adopt
clientelism precisely to make up for a low credibility. The roots of this idea can be traced to the
developmental state literature.
35
empowered citizens, even nominally, to ignore state directives and to view state policy
through a clientelist lens.
The rationale for clientelism’s persistence as an ideal strategy for political actors
is that it induces the compliance so sought after by state leaders. This was perhaps most
easily achieved in pre-colonial or “traditional” societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia,
where vertical ties between subordinate clients and a powerful patron based on mutual
obligation, loyalty, and trust were common (Lemarchand and Legg 1972). Leaders were
thus able to command compliance because their clients had few exit options and needed
protection, as seen for example in lord-vassal or chief-tribute relations.
Although such conditions prevailed in feudal or “primitive” societies,
socioeconomic trends changed clientelist relationships. In the U.S., rapid urban migration
and the expansion of the vote in the late nineteenth century gave rise to urban political
machines built to monitor these new unruly voters and hold them accountable for their
vote. The machine, according to James Scott (1969), “dealt almost exclusively in
particularistic, material rewards to maintain and extend its control” in the face of rising
political competition (1144). Machines achieved compliance by doling out rewards and
punishments for individual voting behavior.
By contrast, the contemporary literature has often reduced clientelism to a selling
of goods for votes. Rather than capturing a shared understanding of a reciprocal
relationship, we determine the existence of clientelism by observing an exchange take
place. Even under machine politics, the payment voters received was not the source of the
36
machine’s coercive power; it was rather the fact that the machine could credibly control
some aspects of the political environment, including verifying how people voted.
This raises the question of whether “vote buying” alone is necessarily an indicator
of clientelism. Schaffer and Schedler (2006) disagree, citing many examples of other
things that an exchange of material goods during an election might signify to voters: a
sign of virtue, a gift, an advance payment, a reparation, or a sign of strength (pp.14-18).
Under any of these alternative meanings, it would be misleading to attribute such
exchanges to clientelism. Yet, this is precisely what has commonly happened, with the
bulk of studies on clientelism focusing on the act of vote buying (Bratton 2008; Vicente
and Wantchekon 2009; Conroy-Krutz and Logan 2012). This choice is further
encouraged by methodological convenience, as a vote buying exchange is a measure
easily captured from public surveys (Khemani 2015; Justesen and Jensen 2014).
If not vote buying, then how should we measure or operationalize clientelism?
Under machine politics, coercion and enforcement came from the machine’s total control
of government and violations of the secret ballot. However, few political machines exist
in many developing countries, especially in Africa, to carry out coercive monitoring and
punishment functions.24 This fact drove scholars to relax assumptions that patrons needed
to completely control a person’s voting decision, rather than just influencing it. They
started to recognize clientelism not as a means of coercion but as one of persuasion,
thereby prioritizing voters’ beliefs and expectations rather than the particular item being
offered in the exchange. For instance, Stokes (2005) emphasizes how party machines in
24 A notable exception is in Latin America, where there is extensive work on the role of machines
in Argentina (Stokes 2005) and Mexico (Magaloni 2006) for example.
37
Argentina target swing voters to convince them that they stand to gain by having the
party in power. Van de Walle (2007) and Kramon (2016) think about how vote buying
offers change voters’ beliefs about the capacity of a candidate to provide (and
presumably withhold) goods to their constituencies.
It seems then that clientelism’s success comes not from the narrow exchange of
material inducements for votes, but in credibly reinforcing citizens’ beliefs that they will
face positive or negative consequences for their vote choice. In the absence of coercive
machines, voters may be free to choose among options, but they do so with the
expectation of winning or losing purely because of that choice. These beliefs have
plausibly had time to form over repeated election cycles, as voters learn to expect that
how their communities voted will affect their future treatment, either by observing such
discriminatory behavior or hearing quid-pro-quo campaign promises from all candidates.
Politicians’ actions, then, raise the salience of client status by making credible
voters’ belief that they will be rewarded or punished solely on the basis of their past vote.
But are these beliefs constrained to electoral politics? I argue that the raised salience of
client status poses strong threats to compliance in other arenas. This is especially true
when citizens connect their client status to the consequences of complying with formal
laws. Conferring client status onto some voters and not others violates critical conditions
needed for compliance to occur: that citizens without client status will perceive credible
benefits from complying, or that citizens with client status will perceive credible
punishment for not complying. When either condition is unmet, citizens are unlikely to
follow formal demands of the state, and politicians are likely to see a reduction in their
ability to enforce rules.
38
I look specifically at tax compliance, which has a very clear set of costs and
benefits and a straightforward compliance decision to pay or not to pay. I illustrate how
citizens see their client status either as grounds for exemption from punishment for not
paying, or as grounds for exclusion from benefiting from public revenue. Both positive
and negative inducements therefore discourage support for and willingness to pay tax, as
state actors are equally unable to effectively deter clients from noncompliance and to
convince non-clients to comply. These decisions in the aggregate chip away at the state’s
capacity to collect taxes.
This chapter explores why politicians’ use of clientelism as an authority-
enhancing strategy may instead decrease the compliance they seek. The question of
political elites’ ability to elicit compliance from their citizens applies to a broader range
of issues because governments are in the business of demanding things from their
citizens. Two big issues facing poor countries looking to develop their economies are
bringing people into the formal economy and getting citizens to contribute to public
services. It is worthwhile to think about how the political environments of these
governments help or hinder these objectives. In this and following chapters, I contribute
to this endeavor by presenting quantitative and qualitative measures of the losses in state
capacity in patronage environments.
Functional Clientelism
Functional explanations for clientelism emphasize two characteristics of voters:
that they have reciprocal norms and that they are poor and uninformed. These accounts
have provided several reasons why politicians choose to use clientelist strategies to
induce voting compliance, and why they work even in the absence of machines.
39
Clientelism is thought to “work” because it is built on repeated interactions between
politicians, brokers, and voters. These interactions encourage either coerced or voluntary
norms of reciprocity. Under coercion, political machines use monitoring tactics and
targeted distribution to convince voters to continue to depend on the machine by
distributing necessary benefits such as food, jobs, or other forms of social welfare.
Political machines therefore use these tactics to maintain votes (Stokes 2007, Magaloni
2006), or to increase turnout in their areas of political support (Nichter 2008). Under
voluntary conditions, parties promote norms of reciprocity that encourage citizens to vote
for the candidate, and use their deep ties to local communities to identify reciprocal
individuals to target (Finan and Schecter 2012). While the first form of reciprocity cannot
explain clientelism without machines, the second form does not explain what produces
naturally reciprocal individuals in the first place.
A second reason we expect clientelist messages to convince voters is that it
appeals to poor voters with immediate needs. Politicians specifically target the poor with
vote-buying efforts, as their marginal utility for small cash or gift handouts is higher
(Brusco et al 2004, Jensen and Justesen 2014). Further evidence of poor voters’
compliance comes from observations that richer voters tend to reject clientelistic goods in
favor of costlier public goods, leaving only the poor to participate (Weitz-Shapiro 2012,
Nathan 2016). The reasoning thus goes that the poor are more likely to be compliant
because clientelism is “pro-poor” in terms of being responsive to their immediate needs,
even as it fails to provide the goods that would improve their life outcomes. Poverty
explanations assume that poor voters care about nothing more than their immediate
40
needs, and therefore cannot account for the possibility that they might prioritize other
types of public goods.
In sum, the functional view of clientelism states that politicians choose clientelism
because it encourages a sense of indebtedness among voters and allows them to be at
least nominally responsive to majority-poor constituencies. Such a view of clientelism
echoes the theoretical reasons for city machines of the late 1800s in America. Merton
(1968) argued that urban machines originated out of a need to respond to the needs of
underserved “subgroups” and “deprived classes” that were “excluded from the
conventional avenues for personal advancement” (quoted in DiGaetano 1988, 244). This
sounds a lot like the urban poor of the more modern theories of clientelism outlined
above. Likewise, the reciprocal view echoes the mutual obligations of traditional
societies, questioning its general applicability to modern urban settings. Reciprocity and
poverty-based explanations, then, seem like modern iterations of classical theory.
Strategic Clientelism
Empirical evidence seems to contradict the functional view and suggest that
clients are not as subordinate as they seem. If clientelism is such an optimal strategy,
then in equilibrium all politicians will choose this strategy in each election period.25 If we
consider that electoral clientelism in its most recent form has prevailed in Africa at least
since the “third wave” democratization of the 1990s, then voters have had long periods of
25 Keefer and Vlaicu (2007) present a formal model showing that in equilibrium, leaders of new
democracies choose clientelism as an optimal strategy because it allows them to overcome
credibility constraints.
41
exposure to these practices. How have citizens of these new democracies adapted after
thirty years of clientelist politics as usual?
Studies suggest that citizens respond by being strategic. Several qualitative
accounts from Africa and Latin America indicate that clientelism persists because voters
uphold norms that oblige politicians to continue this behavior. Lindberg (2010) describes
how local executive committees demand to be “rewarded with their share" after helping
the local MP come into office. These sentiments are echoed in Latin America, where for
instance in Bolivia “clients barter their support during the electoral campaign for
individual and collective gain at the time and in the future" (Lazar, 2004, p.240). Nichter
and Peress (2017) present extensive qualitative evidence that citizens threaten to not vote
for incumbents if their personal requests go unfulfilled. These accounts show the high
salience of beliefs about clientelism and how citizens are willing to act on them to make
demands and sanction politicians.
Weber would not have been surprised by these findings. Patrimonialism, an
umbrella term that captures both clientelism and patronage, is often negatively portrayed
as engendering corruption and strongman politics (Bratton and van de Walle 1997).
However, as critics of the “neopatrimonial” movement remind us (Pitcher et al., 2009),
Weber originally defined patrimonialism as a viable system of authority that allows
subordinates to sanction their patrons. Acknowledging that legitimate authority can come
from many sources, he argues that “traditional” or “patrimonial” authority still involves
an element of voluntary compliance that subordinates can refuse to give if the leader
steps outside the bounds of his traditional authority or fails to fulfill his obligations.
42
It seems then that on both theoretical and empirical grounds, clientelism is
associated with a weakening of politician’s bargaining power when trying to elicit
compliance. Clients have leeway to determine the bounds of their patron’s authority, and
to evaluate the extent to which patrons have fulfilled their obligations. This conflicts with
the functional view of clientelism that still views clients as subordinates with no strategic
aims of their own beyond immediate satisfaction of needs.
Instead, we see evidence that voters choose to vote their conscience while
extracting rents from all candidates. This freedom of choice indicates that even poor
voters are fully aware of the importance of their vote and relish the opportunity to
exercise agency, even temporarily, over elites. Speaking of parliamentary elections in
Benin, Banégas (1998) cites how temporary local election committees would stage
successive rallies for several different candidates, promising their votes to each one and
deftly relieving the candidate of his money. Given rising political competition, this
practice continues today as voters simply accept offers from multiple candidates and
make their own decisions (Vicente and Wantchekon 2009; Guardado and Wantchekon
2014).
If politicians are unable to coerce vote choice as was once possible, then how
does clientelism persist? The evidence above suggests that politicians have colluded to
make the political environment dependent on targeted transfers. In other words,
clientelism persists because of a candidate selection problem, whereby all politicians
employ clientelist tactics, giving voters no other options. This decision makes the set of
political choices deceptively simple for voters by obliging them to rely on particularistic
cues while crowding out other dimensions on which voting decisions could be made.
43
Evidence of elite coordination can be found in discussions of the dominance of valence
issues in African elections. Scholars have argued that politicians intentionally choose to
focus on valence issues to avoid taking positions in environments of high political
uncertainty (Bleck and Van de Walle 2013; Lupu et al 2013). This choice invariably
takes discussion away from substantive issue dimensions that voters could use to evaluate
and sanction party elites, and towards simple heuristics like clientelism and ethnicity.
I think of clientelism as a means for politicians and parties to shape the set of
electoral choice set of voters in such a way that vote choice is an informative indicator of
future redistribution. By raising the salience of vote choice as an indicator, politicians
make it much easier for voters to employ instrumental logic than in developed
democracies where partisan identification has evolved to encompass many aspects of
personal identity that often defy rational logic (Achen and Bartels 2017). Thus, my theory
does not require us to assume that citizens in clientelist democracies are somehow more
“rational” than those of other democracies—rather, that political elites have effectively
constrained their available options to evaluate candidates.
Rather than concluding that this gives political elites ultimate power, however, the
qualitative evidence suggests that this strategy further constrains politicians’ behavior 26
.This occurs because voters learn to adapt to clientelist politicking. Clientelism is “sticky”
to the extent that voters are invested in the practice and demand that it persists.27
26 The limitations to the power of party bosses are likewise highlighted for supposedly all-powerful
machines of the past. On politics in Chicago, Scott (1969, p.1149) writes: “…The boss’s control was forever tenuous. His temporary authority rested on his continuing capacity to keep rewards flowing at the acceptable rate” to vying constituencies (1149, Scott). 27 Wantchekon (2003) and Wantchekon and Vicente (2009) show that candidates that don’t use
clientelist appeals are penalized. Banegas (1998) and Kramon (2016) show that candidates who
44
Politicians must outbid each other with higher vote buying offers to maintain credibility,
and have no choice but to continue these practices as it has now become expected of
them.28 Thus, even when this strategy stops being optimal, their initial choices have
constrained their ability to change course in the future because of voter expectations.
The Reasoning Voter
Given evidence of strategic clients, I make the case that we should take their
beliefs about future redistribution more seriously. A convincing case has already been
made with respect to ethnic cues. There is extensive evidence that voters in Africa and
Asia use candidate ethnicity as an informational shortcut to predict the candidate’s future
behavior. Posner (2005) shows how voters in Zambia use ethnic group size to predict
which groups will receive favored redistribution. Ichino and Nathan (2013) show that
voters in Ghana choose to vote for candidates who are co-ethnics of the locally dominant
ethnic group. In India, Chandra (2007) shows how voters conduct ethnic head counts to
decide which party to support. These and many other studies29 advance the view of
African voters as rational actors who use informational shortcuts to make voting
decisions, similar to American voters (Popkin 1991; Zaller 1992). They also show that
offer nothing, or give low offers, are penalized. Politicians suffer reputational costs from not
participating in clientelism. Nathan (2017) shows that those with no demand for clientelist
transfers choose to exit the electorate rather than demand change (this in turn reduces pressure on
pols to stop). 28 Lindberg (2010) outlines the intense pressures MPs in Ghana face to provide private goods to their
clients. He claims that as “the financial burdens of meetings the requests of voters…have gone up” (p.134), politicians instead seek to substitute clientelist private goods for collective public goods. 29 Conroy-Krutz (2012) runs a conjoint experiment in Uganda testing the informational advantage
of ethnicity as a cue and finds that participants were less likely to vote for a co-ethnic when they
had additional information about the candidate. Eifert et al 2010 find that electoral proximity
increases the salience of ethnic identification in Africa.
45
these shortcuts are effective to the extent that voters perceive that ethnicity conditions
their access to resources.30
Taking existing arguments that African voters have an instrumental view of
ethnicity, I argue that in clientelist environments, vote choice serves as a reliable heuristic
for citizens to predict future redistribution. This is reinforced by politicians’ continued
reliance on clientelist tactics during and after campaigns. In response, citizens are
sensitive to cues about their past voting behavior because votes are seen as the means of
access to both private and local public goods. They use information about their past votes
to anticipate how they will be treated in the future.
This practice leads voters to essentially self-monitor along the lines of Stokes’
(2005) perverse accountability mechanism, where voters hold themselves accountable for
their own voting behavior. Under the increased scrutiny of vote choice, citizens looking
to evaluate their performance will be sensitive not only to a binary vote for the
incumbent, but also to a relative vote as they compare themselves to other potential
beneficiaries. Existing research suggests not only that politicians actively compare vote
turnout across communities at very low levels of aggregation (Rueda 2016, Larreguy et al
2014), but that citizens are also acutely aware of this fact.31
My theory is agnostic to voters’ initial voting decision, especially given
politicians’ limited capacity to coerce votes to begin with. I therefore allow for voters to
30 There are many reasons for African voters especially to believe that co-ethnicity is a predictor
of access to resources, stemming from colonial practices (Bates 1983) to current day ethnic
favoritism (Burgess et al 2013, Franck and Rainer 2012). 31 Rueda (2016) recounts how brokers demand to know the zip codes of voters in Colombia to estimate
how likely the individual is to comply.
46
decide among candidates using their preferred criteria, which may include co-ethnicity,
past performance, or hometown status; and in response to a mix of clientelist strategies
which may range from mass electoral handouts to personalized gifts. Once voters have
made their choices and voted in elections, they use election results to anticipate future
redistribution. They not only consider how they personally voted, but also how the
communities they live in voted as that is what is likely to predict the politician-controlled
spatial allocation of local public goods.
If voters indeed find politicians’ clientelist promises credible, then they should
expect those who voted for the winning candidate to be favored, and those who did not to
be disfavored. Thus clientelism leads to expectations for unequal redistribution
conditional on client status. I further argue that these redistributive expectations are not
limited to handouts just before or after elections, but go on to determine how voters
interpret distributive policies more broadly. That is, the same heuristic they use to
anticipate how a clientelist politician is likely to treat voters after elections is also used to
anticipate the likely outcome of wider distributive policies. These calculations will shape
the willingness to support and contribute to government efforts to redistribute income
towards public goods.
Clientelism’s consequences for taxation
I apply my theory to taxation, the ultimate method for governments to redistribute
income towards public revenue. I argue that citizens’ calculations about who is likely to
win or lose under clientelism shape their support for taxation as a formal—and
supposedly neutral— redistributive policy.
47
The history of taxation in Western democracies illustrates that in order to
convince their citizens to pay taxes, early states had to make concessions and offer
nonexcludable goods such as government protection and public services (Tilly 1990).
Therefore, the legitimacy of the tax system depends partly on citizens’ belief that their
tax contributions will benefit everyone. Clientelism, I argue, undercuts two key aspects
needed for tax compliance: citizens’ certainty that tax revenue will be go towards
universal goods and services, and a credible threat of punishment for not complying.
Clientelism and credible collective gains
Behavioral decision theory, which looks at how people evaluate future outcomes
and make choices on the basis of their evaluations, offers a useful conceptual framework
rooted in psychology to understand compliance decisions (Carroll 1987). Under prospect
theory, people are more sensitive to decisions framed as gains or losses that they estimate
relative to some reference point or status quo (Kahneman and Tversky 1984). By creating
winners and losers in the electorate based on vote choice, clientelism provides a ready
frame of reference for estimating gains (relative to non-clients) and losses (relative to
clients). Prospect theory would predict that in this scenario, non-clients would be more
risk averse—and thus less willing to pay taxes—because the clientelist bargain generates
sure losses for this group.
The expectations of unequal outcomes triggered by clientelism also pose threats
to procedural and distributive justice by making universal appeals to benefit all voters
less credible.
48
Procedural justice refers to participants’ perceived fairness of the legal or
decision-making process (Thibaut and Walker 1975). Psychological studies suggest that
people’s subjective judgments about the fairness of procedures influences their
willingness to comply (Tyler 1990; Tyler 2003; Kinsey et al 1991). That is, people are
sensitive to the process of decision-making when evaluating the legitimacy of a policy. In
clientelist environments, the process of deciding who is eligible for goods and favor is
transparently conditional on vote choice. Thus, citizens are acutely aware of the inherent
inequity underlying such exchanges.
Distributive justice is defined as the process by which “people evaluate the
fairness of outcomes they and others receive in the course of financial, legal, and social
interaction” (Kinsey et al 1991, p.845). Clientelism therefore also violates distributive
justice by perpetuating the belief that individuals and communities who voted for an
incumbent will be treated differently from those who did not. This expected inequality in
the distribution of resources is the main source of coercion in an environment where
politicians otherwise enjoy little capacity to force one’s vote.
I argue that, even when clientelist appeals are not specifically tied to taxation, the
considerations above are still salient to potential taxpayers. We can thus expect tax
appeals, which are usually based on promises that the revenue gained will fund publicly
provided goods, to be less credible to non-clients who have reason to doubt that they will
be beneficiaries. This is because clientelism is in direct contradiction of taxation’s role to
provide universal goods in exchange for tax dollars.
49
Clientelism and credible punishment
Given high proportions of poor citizens in developing countries, taxation is
understandably viewed as a costly burden. For instance, when asked why they think
people generally avoid paying taxes, 55% of Afrobarometer respondents cited costs as
the leading factor. Seeking to escape this burden, citizens can refuse to comply with taxes
if they view taxation as a violation of elected officials’ obligations to protect them from
oppressive state laws.
In Africa especially, the idea that tax evasion serves as a political benefit stems
from a colonial legacy that created a basis for postcolonial leaders’ legitimacy in
subverting formal rules (Ekeh 1975). Under these conditions, citizen clients may reward
leaders that help them evade formal obligations like taxation. When political legitimacy
is thus rooted in the subversion of formal government, the ability to assist citizens in
evading government can be seen as a benefit or political good to be distributed (Chubb
1981). Thus, when leaders impose taxes on clients, it can be seen as a violation of their
obligation to shield their clients from such formal obligations.
When citizens come to see tax enforcement as lying outside the bounds of their
leaders’ sanctioned authority, leaders will naturally find it difficult to punish
noncompliers. Under these conditions, threats to punish tax evaders who are also clients
will not be credible because they violate the leader’s responsibility to shelter his clients
from state obligations. This is especially likely if citizens see tax evasion as a desirable
political benefit, and tax payment as a costly obligation.
50
Taking these two arguments together, we see that clientelism is intimately linked
to taxation because it decreases perceptions of benefiting from tax revenue among those
without client status, and decreases expectations for costly punishment among those with
client status. This is especially apparent when considering that classic models of tax
compliance predict that both perceptions of punishment and benefits are required for
voluntary payment.
The earliest theories take an economic rational choice perspective, wherein
individuals weigh the cost of compliance versus non-compliance, the risk of cheating,
and the likelihood of detection when deciding whether they will comply (Allingham and
Sandmo 1972). This deterrence hypothesis focuses on the coercive capacity of the state to
credibly pursue and punish non-compliers. When a clientelist contract between
politicians and voters erodes leaders’ bargaining power, political elites are less able to
credibly deter noncompliance by threat of punishment.
Even when we consider non-monetary and non-coercive inducements to pay
taxes, as more recent literature has sought to do, we can still find conflicts with the
existence of a clientelist contract. Chief among explanations for a personal willingness to
pay tax, or tax morale, are two social considerations. A fairness hypothesis predicts that
individuals care not only about the absolute provision of public services, but how
equitably they are distributed and how fairly tax laws are applied (Feld and Frey 2002).
In a clientelist environment, those without client status are especially likely to perceive
the application of tax laws as unfair. A social norm hypothesis predicts that willingness to
pay is influenced by whether others either hold pro-tax norms or pay taxes themselves
(Alm and Torgler 2011). Here again, we can think about the dampening effects on
51
compliance when citizens, regardless of client status, observe lax enforcement towards
political supporters of the incumbent. My theory therefore implies that clientelism
violates many of the redistributive assumptions needed for tax compliance to occur.
Contextualizing the theory
The theory outlined above rests on the assumption that citizens can and do deduce
the likely outcome of broader redistribution using client status as a reliable heuristic. I
consider citizens to be rational actors in the clientelist exchange. They consider the likely
provision of collective or local public goods to their communities, rather than just their
likelihood of personally benefiting from an incumbent. This in turn leads them to
consider distributive policies that will determine the provision of local public goods, and
not just private transfers. This view contrasts with existing theories, which cannot
account for the connections citizens make between clientelism and taxation in Benin.
Under the myopic view, clientelism is reduced to vote buying exchanges around
election times to either buy individuals’ votes (Brusco et al 2004) or to encourage them to
turn out either to rallies (Szwarcberg 2013) or to vote (Nichter 2008). Voters only
consider small handouts such as cash, gifts, or clothing rather than substantive policies.
Thus, clientelism consists of a series of one-shot games in the runup to elections, and
voters have no expectations to benefit from the candidate further—until the next election.
Since voters expect very little from their politicians, they have no reason to believe
politicians will follow through on their electoral clientelist promises and see elections as
a limited time to “reap the harvest” (Banegas 1998; Wantchekon and Guardado 2014;
Bratton 2008; Lindberg 2010). Furthermore, the barriers to receiving a vote buying offer
are low, making client status not salient as the exchanges are rather impersonal. Since this
52
view assumes that people, especially poor voters, only care about small, rapid transfers, it
cannot explain the continued salience of client status observed long after and between
elections.
A second prominent view of clientelism is one of repeated interactions between
parties and clients. Recognizing citizen agency to initiate demands of politicians as part
of a clientelist bargain, this view emphasizes exchanges over a sustained period in
between elections (Stokes 2005). The reciprocity implicit in these transactions can be
based on moral norms where voters feel they must comply out of duty or obligation
(Finan & Shechter 2012). The transactions can also be based on a reciprocal
understanding of a clientelist contract, where voters see politicians’ role as performing
constituency service in exchange for political support (Nichter and Peress 2017). Across
these variants, voter demands still stay within the bounds of private transfers, and thus
these theories cannot account for policy demands.32 That is, clients are still
predominantly concerned with their immediate needs, and express no policy priorities.
Finally, the tactical redistribution view of clientelism conceptualizes clientelism
as a strategic choice made by politicians seeking to determine their optimal mix of public
and targeted goods (Dixit and Londregan 1996). They allocate collective public goods (or
what Hicken (2011) calls “clientelist club goods”) on the basis of a constituencies’ core
or swing vote status. However, citizens are noticeably absent from this story, as they
accept the level of the politician’s preferred provision. In many applied instances of the
32 Note: nothing preventing politicians from adopting mixed strategies, and they often do (Calvo and
Murillo 2004); Stokes, Magaloni recount political machines in Argentina and Mexico.
53
theory the politician’s tie to his or her constituency is co-ethnicity, which facilitates the
party’s ability to target core supporters at a lower cost (Kasara 2007; Franck and Rainer
2012). Drawing an equally passive view of voters as the myopic voter model, this view
paints clientelist redistribution as a one-shot game in post-election periods, for instance,
providing roads or schools to supporters after elections (Burgess et al 2015). This view
misses the potential for citizen agency and assumes that client status is salient only to
politicians and not voters. It thus cannot explain active citizen engagement in demanding
clientelist benefits, as we see in Benin and other clientelist settings around the world.
In seeking to explain why clientelist voters with presumably no substantive
concerns express programmatic policy preferences, my theory presents a view of these
voters as policy-aware, actively engaged in clientelist exchanges, and willing and able to
initiate and impose demands on their elected officials. Moreover, they are strategic and
foreword thinking, such that they are able to deduce the consequences of clientelist
practices on larger outcomes of redistribution. In such a case, it is easy to see how and
why they may be motivated to evaluate tax policy from a clientelist lens. My proposed
theoretical framework in comparison to existing theories is summarized in Table 2.1.
Observable Implications of the theory
Existence of generalized clientelist norms
If citizens have indeed internalized clientelist expectations of goods for votes, we
should see them readily apply the heuristic to anticipate the redistributive outcomes
beyond voting decisions, and outside of election periods. In Chapter 3, I show that this
reasoning is consistent across multiple measures of redistributive expectations and tax
54
attitudes more than a year after elections, and is displayed by voters and nonvoters,
indicating its generalizability and persistence.
Table 2.1: Comparison of Clientelism Theories
My theory Myopic
(Kramon 2016,
Nichter 2008,
Schaffer 2007,
Brusco et al 2004)
Repeated
Interactions
(Stokes 2005,
Finan & Schechter
2012, Nichter &
Peress 2017)
Tactical
Redistribution
(Dixit &
Londregan 1996,
Keefer & Vlaicu
2008,
Kitschelt 2000)
Condition for
client status
Relative group
vote for
incumbent
None Personal vote for
incumbent
Binary group
vote for
incumbent
Salience of
client status
Community
client status
salient
Not salient
Personal client
status salient
Community
client status
salient
Mode of
political linkage
Collective Dyadic/personal
(politician to voter)
Dyadic/personal
(broker to voter)
Collective
Citizen agency
High (voters
initiate demands)
Low (voters accept
gifts with no future
expectations)
High (voters
initiate demands)
Low (voters
accept the
politician’s
preferred
provision)
Scope of voter
post-election
demands
Local public
goods
Programmatic
policy
No predictions Private transfers Local public
goods
Reduced bargaining power of political elites
If clientelism curtails political elites’ bargaining power, then we should see their
efforts to enforce stymied by their political clients. In Chapter 4, I show that citizens’
clientelist expectations are relevant to politicians and bureaucrats in charge of
55
implementing tax policy, such that it affects their policy considerations, and their ability
to enforce tax payments via daily interactions with citizens and voters.
Clientelist expectations explain tax resistance
Finally, my theory predicts that citizens will resist taxation on the basis of
clientelist claims. Given that clientelism by definition creates different outcomes for
clients and non-clients, their clientelist grounds for resistance will also differ. Non-clients
will not find promises to benefit from tax revenue credible and will seek to exit or
withdraw from a fiscal exchange with the state rather than give money to a government
they perceive will not work for them (Chapter 3). Clients will find promises for
bureaucratic evasion credible and will seek to bargain or resist taxation on the grounds of
political benefit claiming (Chapter 5).
Thus, challenges to state tax capacity come from both supporters and non-
supporters but via two different mechanisms that illustrate different responses to state
efforts to tax. The end result for both, however, is an exit from the fiscal exchange
contract between state and citizens. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications that
clientelism has for disengagement from the state.
Rethinking Clientelism Theories
In this section, I make the case that observance of the implications above indicates a
challenge to our current assumptions on how clientelism works. A study of how citizens
adopt clientelist norms, and the long-term effects of these norms on political behavior
doesn’t exist because of our priors on clientelism. My dissertation challenges the
following prior assumptions.
56
Contested assumption 1: clientelist voters are myopic
The touted mobilizational advantages of clientelism tend to be short-term, in the
sense that it primarily affects voting behavior. Studies of electoral clientelism have
shown that clientelist appeals encourage voters to turn out, to vote for the candidate, and
to attend rallies where they are further mobilized. Thus, we would not expect clientelism
to affect citizen attitudes in the long run.
However, a norm-driven view of clientelism would suggest that these short-term
calculations do not simply disappear after elections. Extensive evidence on clientelist
exchanges as repeated interactions maintained through acts of constituency service and
request fulfillment supports this view. If we reject the clientelist voters-as-myopic view,
then we can apply clientelist logic to everyday interactions with the state. This then opens
the door to think about long-term consequences clientelism for civic and political
participation more broadly, of which taxation is but one example.
Contested assumption 2: clientelist voters care about handouts, not policy
Another version of the myopic argument has to do with the types of goods
clientelist voters are said to prioritize: immediate goods such as cash or gifts, or one-time
payments. Given evidence that most beneficiaries are poor, this might make sense. As a
result, voters prioritize these small targeted transfers over public goods or policy
considerations. This is a common guiding justification for why clientelism works: it
keeps voters from considering or caring about policy details.
If we consider that norms travel to things other than votes for cash or gifts, then
the potential for policy effects is clear. I show evidence that citizens’ clientelist
57
considerations lead them to apply commonly used heuristics to anticipate policy
outcomes. This view complements emerging evidence that even poor clientelist voters
care about things other than campaign gifts and are willing to use clientelist linkages to
demand accountability. They protest to demand local public goods such as roads
(Harding, 2015), hold politicians accountable when their expectations are raised
(Gottlieb, 2016), and shrewdly demand increasingly costly efforts from their
representatives (Lindberg, 2010).
Finally, a common critique of clientelism is that it effectively supplants formal
channels, or “programmatic” distribution, keeping informal clientelist practices separate
from the policy realm (Kitschelt 2000). My theory would suggest that this separation is
not so clear.
Contested assumption 3: clientelist politicians choose not to provide public goods
Another common assumption is that under clientelism, politicians choose not to
prioritize policy and instead focus on targeted goods. This takes us back to the opening
debate between politician choice versus constraints. If clientelist practices instead
constrain the ability to provide public goods via taxation, then my dissertation offers a
plausible mechanism driving this relationship.
Another variant argues that clientelist politicians do not have incentive to raise
taxes because they are not worried about providing public goods, and don’t want to help
challengers by giving them an accessible source of public revenue (Medina and Stokes
2002). Given the increasing demands of clientelist voters, this idea becomes less and less
58
plausible. I show instead that even clientelist politicians face huge incentives to raise
taxes, giving more empirical evidence that more scholarship in this area is justified.
Contested assumption 4: taxation breeds participation and accountability
Classic theories of state formation cite taxation as a central pillar of the modern
nation-state (Tilly 1990). State extraction prompted populations to demand
accountability, first in the form of state services like protection and public services,
which eventually led to political representation and democratic rights (North and
Weingast 1989). Therefore, taxation is thought to increase citizens’ stakes in the state,
and their willingness to participate in order to hold government accountable for their tax
dollars.
This dissertation challenges theoretical predictions about how citizens will
respond to tax, or what I call the taxation-participation hypothesis. Instead of engaging, I
present two ways in which they respond by exiting or withdrawing from the state (Scott
2009) rather than entering into a fiscal contract to begin with. These findings call
attention to the fundamentally different ways theories of state building can operate in
developing country contexts rooted in clientelism.
Conclusion
This dissertation is about how we think clientelism operates “on the ground,” and how to
measure its more enduring consequences for citizens’ political beliefs. By highlighting
the discrepancies between canonical theories of clientelism and recent empirical trends, I
contribute to a transition in scholarship away from traditional definitions that emphasize
citizen subjugation and the power asymmetry between client and patron. Instead, I show
59
the potential for clientelism to foster substantive political accountability and heighten
citizens’ sense of agency to make claims of their elected officials.
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Chapter 3: Clientelism as a source of tax norms
A significant portion of Beninese citizens expect local public goods to be
distributed as a function of how neighborhoods or villages voted for the mayor. Using a
convenience sample of 77 street vendors and city hall visitors, I had enumerators question
municipal residents about their political expectations in Cotonou, the economic capital,
and its neighboring commuter city of Abomey-Calavi.33 Respondents were posed the
question: “Take two similar neighborhoods in a municipality. One has voted in high
numbers for the mayor and his party, and the other did not vote for him very much. Do
you think the two neighborhoods will be treated the same? How so?”34
The majority of respondents told interviewers that, given two similar villages,
they expected the village who voted for the mayor to be the one most likely to benefit
from discretionary goods. One respondent anticipates negative consequences for a lack of
support: “They [politicians] remember after the election the neighborhoods that voted for
them. The neighborhood that supported the candidate is most favored when it comes time
to make decisions” (Resp 010302). Other respondents used language denoting a mayor
“taking care” of voters or prioritizing his supporters: “He’ll take better care of the places
where he was supported than the neighborhoods where he was less favored” (Resp
010303). A third set of respondents characterized favoritism as a means for politicians to
express gratitude: “Sometimes the politician will be grateful. In this case there will
definitely be a difference between the two. Others don’t care and will forget you until the
33 These are among the most populated and wealthiest municipalities in the South, and in the
entire country. 34 Even though the directions indicated to prompt the respondent on “how so,” most respondents
gave a direct answer without articulating how the neighborhoods would be treated differently.
65
next elections. In this case, no difference” (Resp 010305). This line of reasoning indicates
that some voters are fully cognizant of a contract with elected officials based on goods
for votes.
These sentiments were not uniform, however, as many respondents also resisted
the favoritism narrative. Some expressed this sentiment in a normative sense, in terms of
how they think politicians should behave: “There won’t be a difference. He should work
for everyone so that next time they’ll vote for him” (Resp 011004). Others expressed a
sense of the mayor’s duty to represent all in their statements: “he was elected for the
people, so he will work for all” (Resp 011005).
Thus, we see two conflicting narratives emerging: some citizens express hope that
their elected officials will work for everyone, while others are convinced that those who
did not vote for incumbents will be discriminated against as supporters are favored. Of
the total number of 45 respondents, 65% expected discrimination.
When voters hold themselves accountable for their votes in this manner, relative
differences in communal support can become salient as voters start to view their votes as
an expression of loyalty (Joanis 2011). A personal vote is hidden under the secret ballot,
but a community vote is visible. Hailing from a party stronghold bolsters individual
demands to politicians, as the seeker can claim residence in a district or neighborhood
that heavily supported the incumbent district councilor or the mayor himself, relative to
other neighborhoods. Emerging research in Latin America shows such incidences of
“request fulfillment” are prominent (Nichter and Peress 2017) and can be more
persuasive when the relative strength of past electoral support is greater. Requesters can
66
claim that they−and the neighborhoods they inhabit−went above and beyond in their part
of the clientelist exchange of goods for votes.
Interviews with local politicians confirmed similar dynamics in Benin. District
councilors receive daily visits from residents who make their cases for both private and
collective requests to be relayed to the mayor or the local administration. A district
councilor in Adjarra, a neighboring commune to the nation’s administrative capital of
Porto-Novo, reports that he gets dozens of visits to his office daily. His constituents come
to him for all manner of things, from help with administrative documents to theft reports
and requests for financial help (Personal interview, CA Adjarra). Other councilors noted
both individual and group visits to their offices for both private matters, such as school
fees, and public ones, such as road repairs and street lamps. In an environment where
spending decisions are made with the presume discretion of locally elected officials, it
would be expected that citizens would use information about a locality’s political
affiliation to infer its likely share of public resources. In this way, past voting behavior
would become a metric by which both politicians and voters estimate eligibility for
favors post-elections.
In this chapter, I ask to what extent to citizens perceive they will be treated
differently depending on their community’s vote choice. I then measure the effect of
these perceptions on levels of support for taxation.
I propose that expectations of discrimination when politicians allocate local public
goods play a central role in shaping people’s tax preferences, especially when they do not
believe their community will receive their fair share of the eventual public goods that will
67
be generated from tax revenue. I am thus concerned with the impact clientelist
expectations have on outcomes beyond voting, in this case on willingness to pay tax.
An experimental design would be ideally suited for this task, as it has the
potential to solve endogeneity problems that have prevented scholars of clientelism from
isolating the effect of a past vote on future expectations to benefit from that vote. Using
past vote choice to explain future attitudes and behaviors inevitably runs into endogeneity
concerns, as the same factors that predict voting for a candidate or party are also likely to
inform post-election expectations. These factors may include the presence of a co-ethnic
candidate (Adida, 2015; Conroy-Krutz, 2013), a candidate’s past public goods delivery
(Harding, 2015), or signals of the candidate’s future capacity to favor with targeted goods
(Kramon, 2016).
While vote choice is not randomly assigned, perceptions of relative votes can be
randomly manipulated. I therefore designed an experiment that randomly changes
citizens’ perception of their locality’s political support for the incumbent mayor’s party
by giving them information on relative vote tallies. Using this experimental design, I
establish a causal relationship between citizens’ clientelist expectations and their support
for the state’s right to tax.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. I first highlight distinctive features
of the distributive process in Benin that easily lead citizens to make the connection
between clientelist politics and taxation outcomes. I then present further qualitative
evidence that the features do influence citizens’ attitudes. Next, I present an information
experiment meant to isolate the effect of knowing one’s relative communal support for
68
the ruling party on expectations to benefit from, and thus support, taxation. Finding
consistent supporting evidence for the idea that knowledge of past votes affects present
willingness to pay taxes, I end with implications for…
Why we should expect links to taxation
Benin is an ideal setting to study citizens’ exposure to taxation because it satisfies
key conditions of clientelist environments that make it easy to attribute outcomes to
particular politicians.
First, it is an environment where politicians (especially the mayor) enjoy a great deal of
discretion in spending decisions. This means city residents can attribute blame or
responsibility for both taxing and spending.
Second, Benin’s political parties tend to be regionally dominant, making party
brands relatively strong at the local level, even as parties proliferate at the national level
(Lupu et al. 2013). This coupled with a PR system further enhances political party
dominance over individual candidates, rendering political party affiliation a salient
concept.
Third, the targeted delivery of scarce local public goods across neighborhoods
makes the location of these goods consequential. This facilitates citizens’ ability to link
politicians’ choices to distributive outcomes, further increasingly the likelihood that they
will perceive provision as instances of favoritism and discrimination.
In such a setting, one would expect citizens to be particularly sensitive to their
community’s party affiliation, as it is likely to influence the amount of consideration or
“care” they expect to receive. I go over these points in more depth below.
69
Political Discretion
Mayors in Benin enjoy centralized power to make executive decisions, which
includes executive authority over the budget. This is due to Benin’s hierarchical local
government structure. Each of the country’s 77 mayors oversees a municipal council
made up of representatives of the districts in the municipality. The mayor meets with
district councilors each fiscal year to decide how to allocate the budget across the districts
in the municipality. Although budgets are deliberated within the council and subject to a
council vote, the mayor has ultimate authority over the budget and over the
administrative bureaucracy over which he presides.
These dynamics are illustrated in everyday local politics. After not receiving the
health clinic he requested in that year’s budget, the chief councilor in the Ouidah’s 4th
District unhappily declared that, “the mayor’s budget is everyone’s budget. If the mayor
doesn’t authorize our requests, we aren’t able to realize our dreams.”35 His frustrations
are understandable, as he was part of a small contingent of councilors who led the failed
attempt to impeach Ouidah’s mayor earlier that year for misuse of funds. After
unanimously passing Cotonou’s budget in 2016, the 47-member municipal council
publicly thanked the mayor for “taking into account the majority of their concerns.”36
While council relations are not always so harmonious,37 this dynamic reflects the idea
35 Personal interview with the Chef d’Arrondissement, Ouidah 4, Dec. 15, 2016 36 3ème session ordinaire du Conseil Municipal de Cotonou : Le budget exercice 2016 voté à
l’unanimité des conseillers. (2016, September 26), Le Matinal. Retrieved from http://quotidien-
lematinal.info/3eme-session-ordinaire-du-conseil-municipal-de-cotonou-le-budget-exercice-
2016-vote-a-lunanimite-des-conseillers/ 37 For example, the mayor of Ouidah was impeached via a vote of no confidence in 2017, with a
unanimous vote from his 15 district councilors. He was impeached on the accusation of
mismanaging public funds. Just that year, there were at least four other mayors facing votes of no
confidence across the country.
70
that the mayor has the ultimate executive authority. This sentiment was echoed by several
municipal councilors, who each talked about negotiating with the mayor to include items
from their district’s agenda.38
Thus, voters elect their district representatives to the council to act as a liaison to
the mayor who can advocate for their particular needs. District councilors often do so
publicly to increase pressure on mayors to respond and signal their efforts to their
constituents.39 Such public appeals allow for a clear line of responsibility for the
allocation of public funds and provision of public goods from local representatives with
relatively less power, to the executive who has the final say. While in practice the mayor
is not all-powerful and is highly subject to censure and sometimes even removal,
performative acts of deference to the executive can still signal to citizens that he or she
bears ultimate responsibility.
Perceptions of the mayor’s executive authority are also facilitated by the fact that
mayors often play the role of figurehead of their municipalities. They attract funding
from international agencies and the central government, and coordinate with the President
on the national stage. In the wake of these achievements, public statements in media
consistently attribute development projects to the mayor. For instance, a newspaper
38 Les impressions de quelques Conseillers suite au vote du Budget de la Mairie de Cotonou
exercice 2016. (2015, November 24), Le Matinal. Retrieved from: http://quotidien-
lematinal.info/les-impressions-de-quelques-conseillers-suite-au-vote-du-budget-de-la-mairie-de-
cotonou-exercice-2016/ 39 In this article, a district councilor in Cotonou asks the mayor to fund the installment of public
latrines and trash receptacles for his constituents. Assainissement de la ville de Cotonou:
Ahouanssori-Towéta 1, siège de l’insalubrité. (2017, August 12), Le Matinal. Retrieved from
http://quotidien-lematinal.info/assainissement-de-la-ville-de-cotonou-ahouanssori-toweta-1-siege-
de-linsalubrite/
71
article announcing the construction of local classrooms states: “Under the authority [of
the mayor], the communal council has ordered the construction of school classrooms for
the municipality’s children.”40 These media attributions again serve to emphasize the
mayor’s discretion and executive authority.
Informative Party Labels
To assess the extent to which politics matters for taxation in Benin, one must look
at how Benin’s political landscape is structured around the country’s dominant parties. I
show in this section that Benin’s political system favors regionally dominant parties with
“long” histories and informative labels. Thus, party identification is meaningful - a
necessary condition for a story about how party votes shape expectations for favoritism
or discrimination.
The country was ruled under a dictatorship until democratization in 1990, when
the Rennaisance Part of Benin (RB) became the first presidential ruling party under
President Nicephore Soglo. In the mid-2000s, the Cowry Forces for an Emerging Benin
(FCBE) came to dominate national politics as the party associated with then-President
Yayi Boni. The RB, along with the Party for Democratic Renewal (PRD) and the Social
Democratic party (PSD) remained the main opposition parties. At the time of this study
(2014-2016), the FCBE was still the dominant national party, leading the share of seats in
Parliament.41
40 Infrastructures scolaires à Ifangni: La mairie lance la construction de 6 modules de classes.
(2017, September 11), Le Matinal. Retrieved from http://quotidien-lematinal.info/infrastructures-
scolaires-a-ifangni-la-mairie-lance-la-construction-de-6-modules-de-classes/ 41 In the April 2015 parliamentary elections, FCBE won 30% of the vote. Union makes the Nation
(UN), a conglomeration of opposition parties, won second place with 14% of the vote.
72
The five municipalities in this survey study are concentrated in the southern
opposition areas of Benin and are affiliated with political parties with strong historical
and regional relevance. These areas largely correspond to three parties: the Democratic
Renewal Party (PRD) in the southeastern region, the Benin Rebirth (RB) party in the
southern and central regions, and the local Rassemblement des Democrates Libereaux
(RDL-VIVOTEN) party in the coastal municipality of Ouidah, a member group of the
national opposition alliance, Union Makes the Nation (UN).
The three parties have common characteristics that make their party labels
informative. They have existed for many years, with one (the PRD) dating back to 1990
during Benin’s democratic transition. The parties also retain strong ties to their founders,
some of which are current or former mayors, which allows citizens to make clear links
between mayor and party.42 The PRD and RB especially have distinct regional bases,
establishing them as major players in the regional and national stage, and increasing their
status as legitimate contenders in national contests.43
Party labels are not simply synonymous with certain ethnic groups. While each
party has ties to the ethnic groups that dominate their regions, the PRD and RB especially
are regional parties encompassing multiple ethnic groups.44 Interviews with local actors
suggest that party votes are a reflection of a combination of factors that allow voters to
estimate how well its candidates can signal their local understanding of community
42 The RB was founded by former President and Mayor of Cotonou, Nicephore Soglo in 1996.
Likewise, the RDL-Vivotin was founded by the Mayor of Ouidah, Severin Adjovi, in 2008. 43 The RB presidential candidate in 2001 won 27% of the first round popular vote; the PRD
presidential candidate in 2006 won 24% of the first round popular vote. 44 See Bierschenk (2006) for a discussion of multi-ethnic regional parties in Benin.
73
interests. In addition to co-ethnicity, these factors include the prestige of candidates,
being a “son” or “daughter” of the community, or candidates’ past track record of
community service and involvement. At the local level, many potential candidates fit
these criteria, leading to a proliferation of local candidates and ad hoc coalitions that rival
regional parties. A similar proliferation happens on the national stage, as over 40 parties
declared candidates in the 2016 presidential elections. Some local coalitions, like the
RDL-Vivotin in Ouidah, manage to succeed and gain power in their own right.
Elections are closed list proportional representation contests that emphasize party
labels over individual candidates.45 One indicator of party prevalence is high councilor
turnover in the presence of stable party votes. Of the 141 district councilors elected in the
five municipalities of my sample, 85 (60%) of them were newly elected in 2015. One
indicator of party prevalence is the low incidence of party switching: of the 56 councilors
who kept their seats, only seven of them switched party affiliation from the 2008 to the
2015 elections. On the other hand, parties displayed far greater staying power. They kept
over 90% of their council seats. The high turnover of party candidates lists suggests that
voters need not have strong preferences for a particular district representative to cast a
vote, as they are likely to be voting for the candidates the party lists. When party labels
are thus informative, relative affiliation to the mayor’s party (the main piece of
information provided in the experiment below) should also be informative for citizen
attitudes.
45 Elections are held every five years. The dates are 2003, 2008, and 2015, with the last election
delayed by two years by former President Boni.
74
Targeted Delivery
Local politicians can make the delivery of targeted goods conditional on vote
choice because political representation at each geographical unit reinforces neighborhood
and district borders. Elected neighborhood or village chiefs relay their residents’ interests
to district councilors, who then advocate for their constituents to the mayor. Therefore,
when funds are provided to install a neighborhood borehole, add a new classroom to a
district school, or repair roads in the district, citizens interpret this as successful
bargaining on the part of the relevant political representative to funnel resources back to
their community. Since these resources go to some districts and neighborhoods and not
others, they are locally exclusionary by nature.
Table 3.1 lists some examples of common public projects municipalities
undertake, which are often at least partially funded by tax revenue.46 These projects have
clear potential to benefit receiving communities over others; in some cases they are zero-
sum, and thus exclusionary.
For instance, in the municipality of Adjohoun (Southeastern Benin, in the Porto-
Novo/Oueme region), only half of the villages (four out of eight) in the district have
electricity.47 The provision of electricity itself, or electricity-based goods such as street
lamps, is excludable in the sense that given two neighboring villages, one might have
electricity and the other might not. Decisions about provision of local public goods are
objective only to a point (in the sense of responding to local needs), but within that realm
46 The sources of documentation for these projects come from various online newspapers in
Benin. 47 Gaspard Gbolihonon dévoile ses ambitions pour Agbangnizoun.(2015, 8 August), 24H Benin.
Retrieved from: http://www.24haubenin.info/?+Gaspard-Gbolihonon-devoile-ses+
75
there remains ample room for discretion. It applies for a variety of goods, such as which
classrooms in which districts or neighborhoods get repaired or furnished, where public
water taps are installed, and which neighborhood markets receive infrastructure repair. I
argue, among many other scholars (Ichino and Nathan 2013; Franck and Rainer 2012),
that the ways citizens perceive these decisions to be made will significantly influence
their willingness to support the taxation that will fund the provision of these goods.
Table 3.1. Local Public Goods Examples
Water/Sanitation Infrastructure Health Schools
Construction of an
underground
drainage tunnel
Installation of
public water taps
Provision of
fertilizer and waste
treatment materials
Initializing a
subscription waste
collection service
Repair and
maintenance of 120
km of rural roads
Construction of
market stalls and
shop units in the
market
Distribution of 100
street lamps
Resumption of
housing projects in
10 zones
Acquisition of an
ambulance for local
health centers
Construction of a
clinic in a particular
village or district
Four classrooms
built in public
primary schools
Installation of three
latrines in primary
schools
Construction of an
orphanage
Three furnished
primary school
classrooms
Consequences for citizens’ expectations
The open-ended survey I conducted on street vendors and city hall visitors drew a
clear picture of citizens’ expectations in a clientelist environment. They had especially
low expectations of politicians, believing them to be either purely self-interested, or only
interested in serving their close connections and narrow constituencies. When asked
whether they thought local politicians did their best to listen to the concerns of “people
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like them,” over half (58 percent) of respondents said no. (N=77 total, N=45 coded so
far). When asked whom they thought politicians listened to instead, the most common
answers were either “each other,” or some variation of “their own.” While “their own”
may refer to a close circle of friends and family members, it can also refer to a
politician’s home constituency. Respondents often attributed the self-interest and
favoritism to politicians’ original motivation for running for office: “It’s because they
only went into politics for their own good and not for the good of the population” (Resp
010301). Others attributed the lack of concern directly to their non-membership in
politicians’ circles of consideration. As one respondent put it, “I’m not a part of their
family for them to be willing to listen to me” (Resp 041005). Another went so far as to
state the issue in purely political terms: “We’re not a part of their political party, and
there is rampant corruption” (0403012).
It is clear from these responses that membership in a politician’s favored
constituency, variably defined, is regarded as key to gaining access to resources and
consideration, and as such something to be valued. It also seems that the default
assumption is that politicians will not work for the good of all constituents. In order to
combat these perceptions, politicians would need to credible ways to signal to their
constituents that they will in fact benefit. As we saw in the introduction, and in much of
the existing literature, clientelist appeals are a viable means to achieve this by emitting
positive signals. What the literature fails to address, however, are the equally clear
negative signals sent to non-supporters. I measure the potential for both positive and
negative spillovers of such appeals in the experimental setup below.
77
Relative Voting Behavior as Informational Cues
My theory states that relative, group-level comparisons of past voting behavior
should significantly shape distributive expectations, and by extension, support for
taxation. An observable implication of the theory is that past vote tallies should be a
salient piece of information in citizens strategic calculations and decision-making.
African voters, like most voters, rely on informational shortcuts to decide between
political candidates and to form expectations of how candidates will perform after
elections (Zaller 1992). This practice is especially necessary in contexts where political
parties tend to emphasize valence issues instead of providing distinguishable and
informative policy platforms (Lupu et al. 2013; Bleck and Van de Walle 2013; Kitschelt
2000). In response, voters compensate by seeking non-programmatic cues to determine
which party or candidate will most benefit their communities in the provision of targeted
local public goods or private goods.
Under this rational voter model, knowledge of group votes should be a useful
heuristic that helps voters estimate the nature of redistribution, as in the qualitative survey
responses. I therefore predict the following:
H1: A higher-than-average district vote share for the mayor’s party increases
expectations for the district to benefit from local public goods provision and a lower-
than-average vote share decreases expectations.
So far, the argument confirms the predictions of existing theories on clientelism.
But positive and negative expectations stemming from clientelist logic can influence
redistributive outcomes when citizens apply the logic to tax policy to anticipate the
78
expected gains from redistribution. Existing literature offers several ways that
redistributive expectations and tax attitudes are clearly linked.
The first strand of research highlights the instrumental, or economic, incentives
that shape tax preferences. One of the central underpinnings of classic tax models in
political economy is that low-, middle-, and high-income classes choose their preferred
level of taxation based on the expected gains from redistribution (Romer 1975; Meltzer
and Richard 1981). These models were developed in contexts of programmatic politics,
where party policies predictably shape class-based utility functions, and thus, distributive
outcomes. Using similar logic, I consider how ruling party affiliation can also shape
expectations for redistribution, and thus support for taxation. This is most likely to
happen in a context where redistribution is conditional on electoral support. In this case,
affiliation with the incumbent, and not class, is the significant indicator of expectations
for post-electoral redistribution.
A related set of literature conceptualizes taxation as a social contract. These
canonical theories of tax compliance center on a fiscal exchange hypothesis: citizens are
willing to pay taxes when they think they will receive tangible goods and services from
the state in return for their tax dollars (Levi 1988; Tilly 1992; Moore 2008). I argue that
living in a low- or high-incumbent vote area can influence perceptions of the quantity or
quality of goods and services residents will receive. If citizens are making inferences
about redistribution and applying them to tax-related issues, then there should be a clear
link between positive or negative clientelist expectations and expectations to benefit
specifically from tax revenue.
79
H2: A higher-than-average district vote share for the mayor’s party increases
expectations for the district to benefit from tax revenue and a lower-than-average vote
share decreases expectations.
In addition to instrumental motives, positive tax attitudes are also shaped by
perceptions of fairness and equity (Levi, Sacks, and Tyler 2009). Citizens are more likely
to comply with laws when they are deemed to be fair and just (T. R. Tyler 1990).
Whereas common critiques of clientelism prioritize the vertical inequality between patron
and client, clientelism can also engender perceptions of horizontal inequality between
supporters and non-supporters that call into question the fair application of policies. In
this way, those who expect to be discriminated against are least likely to trust that public
resources will be redistributed equally. I therefore expect residents of under-voting
districts to expect less equitable redistribution on the part of politicians. Residents in
higher-voting districts will expect greater equity, as they are more confident that they will
be included as beneficiaries and are less worried about negative discrimination.
H3: A higher-than-average district vote share for the mayor’s party increases
expectations for equitable redistribution and a lower-than-average vote share decreases
expectations.
The first three hypotheses predict a positive relationship between a surplus of
local incumbent vote shares and expectations for redistribution of local public goods and
tax revenues, as well as the overall equity of redistribution. The last set of hypotheses
connect these expectations directly to support for tax policy. By increasing (decreasing)
perceptions of the benefits that will accrue to their community and perceptions of a fair
80
process, citizens’ considerations of their relative vote choice increases (decreases)
willingness to tolerate or support taxation. I therefore predict the following:
H4a: Support for taxation is increasing in the district vote share for the mayor’s party.
H4b: A higher-than-average district vote share for the mayor’s party increases support
for taxation, and a lower-than-average vote share decreases support.
This reasoning departs from conventional explanations for tax compliance and tax
attitudes by recognizing that not all individuals estimate the gains from tax equally. The
most relevant difference I propose is the relative level of community votes, which are tied
to location and thus can determine which areas will be more or less favored in the
redistribution of targeted local public goods. Other proposed explanations for low tax
compliance or negative tax attitudes include lack of trust in state institutions or leaders,
dissatisfaction with public services, and disapproval of government performance. In
African politics, another notable determinant of tax attitudes is co-ethnicity, with the
prediction of more tax compliance among the share of the population with co-ethnics in
power. These competing explanations are especially troublesome if they are correlated
with residence in incumbent- or opposition-leaning districts. I test both the relative
importance of these alternative hypotheses and their correlation with district vote shares
in the empirical section. I show that these competing factors are widely shared attributes
across the population and cannot account for all of the variation in support for taxation.
My theory can be summarized as follows. When politicians make redistribution
conditional on electoral support, past relative vote choice becomes a reliable heuristic for
the relative allocation of resources. In areas of high or relatively higher support, residents
81
can more credibly show their past support and thus have higher expectations to benefit.
They are best positioned to make such claims because proof of their political support is
visible and verifiable. As such, they have higher expectations of gaining from the
redistribution of tax revenue, and are therefore more willing to support taxation. In areas
of low or relatively lower support, residents cannot credibly show their electoral support
and therefore believe they cannot claim benefits based on political support. They expect
politicians to treat them less well, and perhaps even to penalize them. These expectations
decrease support for taxation because they expect to get less in exchange for their tax
dollars.
Empirical Strategy and Data
Comparing the attitudes of residents in incumbent strongholds and opposition
areas is difficult, as these two populations likely differ in ways that affect the outcomes of
concern in this article. That is, people in incumbent areas are more likely to approve of
the mayor and his party for factors unrelated to expectations of favors in return for votes,
or precisely because the candidate possesses characteristics that make future favoritism
promises more credible. Observing that most of their neighbors voted for the incumbent,
they may consider “their” winner to be more legitimate, or trust their chosen
representative to accurately represent their concerns. Likewise, residents of districts that
did not go for the mayor’s party may express negative attitudes along these same
dimensions. Any unwillingness on their part to pay taxes may simply reflect political
disagreement rather than expectations to be discriminated against. Without a reference
point, it is difficult to determine to what extent vote choice on its own really matters for
expectations.
82
My empirical strategy addresses these concerns in two ways. First, the mayor is a
political figure that is not directly elected by voters, therefore alleviating some concerns
about candidate selection. Second, the explanatory variable to be randomly manipulated
is knowledge of the electoral distance from the mayor, rather than a binary measure of
partisan support. This reduces the need to compare purely opposition and purely pro-
incumbent districts.
Indirect Mayor Elections
Benin’s two-round proportional representation system to indirectly elect
municipal mayors make it an ideal case to test my theory of relative voting. First, voters
do not know who the mayor will be, and cannot be certain which party he or she will
come, at the time they cast their vote. They find out after the fact, when all districts have
cast their vote and the party with a majority of seats in the council selects the mayor from
within their ranks.48 The experimental assumption of comparability between districts just
below and just above the average is thus plausible because voters do not know a priori
whether and by how much they are supporting the eventual mayor and his party.
The mayor’s indirect election gives rise to a second important feature of Beninese
local politics: the need for cooperation between the mayor and directly elected district
councilors to pass laws and approve the budget. When the elected mayor also has a
council party majority, he can enact policies with less resistance from opposition party
councilors. A match between the mayor’s party affiliation and the majority of councilors
48 In the first round, parties run candidates in each district for a set of district seats on the
municipal council. Parties who win at least 40% of the first round vote in a district receive a
majority of the seats in that district, while the remaining seats are assigned in proportion to the
voteshares of all the parties that presented candidates (Bierschenk 2006)
83
therefore increases the real and perceived unilateral power of the mayor, by essentially
providing him with a rubberstamp council. Otherwise, in cases of a plurality, coalitions
are necessary to obtain governing majorities, leaving the elected mayor much less room
for unilateral discretion. In such cases, we would expect affiliation to a relatively weak
mayor to matter less for citizens’ expectations that the mayor will be able to reward or
punish them for their votes. The survey sample includes two municipalities with
coalitional majorities, which allows us to observe variation in the mayor’s discretionary
power.
Case Selection
The survey was implemented in 18 districts from five municipalities that span
three urban zones in Southern Benin.4950 There were 720 households (60 percent) and 432
businesses (40 percent) surveyed.51 The survey population consisted mostly of likely
taxpayers, including vendors and business owners liable for public domain fees and other
49 Across the three zones, the survey was split between Cotonou-Ouidah (N=464), Bohicon
(N=256), and Porto-Novo-Adjarra (N=432). Districts were selected along three criteria. They
were located in one of Benin’s six southern departments; they had a household population density
of 100 households per square kilometer or greater; and at least two such districts had to exist per
municipality. These criteria successfully identified urban population clusters in the South. From
this list, I selected 18 districts based on the mayor’s party voteshare. 50 The survey reached an average of 64 respondents per district. Each district on average
contained 4 neighborhoods, for a total of 72 neighborhoods. Each neighborhood had 16
respondents, for a total of 1,152 respondents. The 16 respondents in each neighborhood were
divided between businesses and households, and were selected using a random walk procedure in
residential and market areas. In each neighborhood, 10 households and 6 businesses were
interviewed. 51 Business owners were asked about the district where they worked and owned their business.
For this reason, only established businesses in fixed locations were interviewed (no roving
vendors). All entrepreneur respondents were residents of the municipality they worked in, so the
sample does not include those who travel from their home municipalities to sell in central
markets.
84
business taxes and licensing fees, and homeowners liable for property tax.52 To diversify
the sample and reflect the population at large beyond taxpayers, I also included were
members of the homeowner’s household who were present during the interview (40% of
the sample), and who may or may not have to personally pay taxes.53
In terms of city demographics, cities were selected for high population density in
order to ensure many taxable areas and reduce urban-rural inequalities so that districts
would be more comparable. The cities were also in the top 10 percent in terms of annual
revenue collected to address the issue of tax capacity and make sure that tax collection
was a relevant part of daily life. If we observe the effects of clientelism in the most
capable municipalities and among populations with sufficient income to be taxed, then
we might think these issues further exacerbated in lower-income and low tax capacity
rural municipalities.
I also selected municipalities to vary on the level of support for the mayor’s party
at the district and municipal level, as both are important to my theory. The level of
overall municipal support for the mayor determines mayor party dominance and latitude
for discretion. The district vote share for the mayor’s party indicates the extent of local
support, relative to other potential constituencies. Thus, the research design allows me to
52 Street vendors and shop keepers were interviewed at their place of business. Homeowners were
interviewed in their homes, following the same enumeration procedure used for Afrobarometer
surveys. 53 There were 720 households (60 percent) and 432 businesses (40 percent) surveyed. The split
sample was intended to maximize the number of respondents directly affected by business license
taxes and property taxes. Of the households, 81 percent of respondents owned their home and
were thus liable for property taxes. I did however attempt to broaden the population by including
representatives of the household head, which included their spouses, siblings, or children over the
age of 18. Of the household surveys, 64 percent were representatives.
85
account for both the mayor’s party overall support in the municipality and each district’s
relative support. The objective of the analysis is to establish whether residents perceive
this over- or under-support as instrumental to redistribution.
Municipal votes for the mayor’s party range from 28 % in Ouidah to 85% of in
Porto-Novo. Table 3.554 shows variation in municipal conditions along the amount of
political control and thus discretion the mayor and his party enjoys. To get relative vote
tallies, I calculated the difference between the municipal vote share for the mayor’s party
and each district’s vote share. A negative value indicates a district that voted less for the
mayor’s party than the average, and a positive value indicates a district that voted more
than the average. These differences are listed in column 3 of Table 3.5. The sample
contains 10 positive vote margin districts and 8 negative vote margin districts (see
Table 5)
Figure 3.1 shows the range of district vote shares for the above-average and
below-average districts included in the sample. It is important to note that a below-
average vote does not indicate less than 50% of the vote. Respondents can live in districts
that voted less than the mayor on average, but still voted in majorities. This is because the
research design is meant to measure the effect of relative group votes, rather than the
effect of living in a strictly incumbent or opposition area. Because of this design, I can
compare districts that voted in similar proportions for the mayor’s party, but received
either a negative or positive information treatment. I can then estimate the effect of
framing similar vote shares as positive or negative increments of 5 percent relative to the
54 All Chapter 3 tables can be found in the Chapter 3 Appendix.
86
overall municipal vote share. Figure 3.1 clearly shows that the majority of the two
distributions, above- and below-average voting districts, overlap from about 40 percent to
80 percent district vote shares. This gives me ample room to make plausible comparisons
between the two groups.
Figure 3.1: Observed Values of District Voteshares
To minimize structural differences between incumbent- and opposition-leaning
areas, I compare districts with vote shares of up to 15 percent from the average municipal
share of mayor party votes. As Table 3.3 shows, these attempts were not entirely
successful as there are still significant differences between the two groups. Nonetheless, I
maintain that the effectiveness of my experiment is not necessarily predicated on these
two populations being identical. The key point of similarity required is for both
populations to be unaware of their district’s vote share for the mayor’s party relative to
87
the municipal average. I argue that this is a plausible assumption to make, especially in
areas that are less than 5% away from the average.5556
The research design sets up a straightforward testing of my hypotheses. My first
and second hypotheses were that local vote choice relative to the average should
significantly shape expectations to benefit the district via local public goods, and via tax
revenue. This means that information about an above-average (below-average) vote will
increase (decrease) expectations of favorable distributive policy. My third hypothesis is
that relative local vote choice will shape expectations about politicians’ distributive
policy. If true, then information about an above-average (below-average) vote will
increase (decrease) expectations of favorable distributive policy.
My fourth hypothesis relates party affiliation directly to support for tax policy. By
tax policy, I mean citizen’s normative views on how much the population should be
taxed. While in a more formal tax setting this would be referred to as the effective tax
rate, the dependent variable is modified to this normative measure to accommodate
varying education levels of the respondents and to better reflect the workings of informal
taxation as it is practiced in Benin. In the survey, citizens get to select their preferred tax
rate by specifying how much of the budget should come from direct taxation of the
population. A higher proportion indicates a higher tolerance for the state’s taxation
55 An ideal way to test this would be to compare their estimates of their districts’ vote shares for
the mayor. However, this question elicited too many non-responses in pilots to be included in the
survey. This provides further proof that respondents were unaware of relative votes, even if they
knew the vote tallies for their districts. 56 If this assumption is indeed plausible, then we might expect to see the largest treatment effects
in areas with very close vote margins. I do find that this is the case in robustness checks, but the
data is noisy given the small subset sizes.
88
activities, while a zero or low proportion indicates that the respondent thinks the state
should not tax the population at all or very little. I test H4 in two ways. First, if H4a is
true, then tax policy preferences should increase in the district’s vote share for the
mayor’s party, as this affiliation cues respondents of their membership in the winning
coalition. This means that voters in higher mayor vote share districts will be more willing
to support tax efforts, holding all else equal. If H4b is true, positive information of a
greater-than-average vote should increase support for taxation, while negative
information should decrease support. The mechanisms driving this relationship are
enumerated in H1 to H3: by raising (lowering) expectations to benefit and trust that
politicians will redistribute tax revenue equitably, clientelist logic increases (decreases)
support for taxation among presumed political winners (losers).
Treatment Assignment
The treatment was implemented at the individual level: within the same district,
individuals in the treatment group received information about how their district vote
while the control group did not. The main treatment variable was information related
about the respondent’s district vote share for the mayor’s party relative to the municipal
average. On average, there were two districts with a greater-than-average vote share for
the mayor’s party and two districts with a lower-than-average vote share. Respondents in
the treatment group were shown the following simplified figure relaying information
solely on how their district voted for the mayor’s party relative to all the districts in the
municipality, in Figure 3.2.
89
Figure 3.2: Information treatments
To ensure uniformity of the treatment, I set the municipal vote for the mayor’s
party (the central figure in black) at 0 and measured how much above or below that
percentage a particular district (in red) was in voting for the mayor’s party. I then
assigned intervals of 5 percentage points and rounded up or down when appropriate to
produce the six treatment conditions shown below. For example, if the municipal vote for
the mayor’s party was 45% and the district’s vote for the mayor’s party was 54%, then
the difference is +9% and would be rounded up to 10%. If the difference were -4%, it
would be rounded down to -5%. The complete list of districts and vote margins (thus
treatment assignments) is in Table 5. The modal assignments were T2, -10%, and T6,
+15%.
Enumerators gave the following prompt to respondents while showing them the
picture: “We looked up your commune’s vote tally from the election results publicly
Negative Treatment Positive Treatment
90
distributed by the electoral commission. Here is your district’s vote for the mayor’s party,
relative to the vote of other districts in the commune. The number of votes for the
mayor’s party in the entire commune is in the middle. Figures to the left indicate districts
that voted less for the mayor’s party, and figures to the right indicate districts that voted
more for the mayor’s party than the commune as a whole. This is where your district is
relative to all the other districts in the commune put together.” [The enumerator then
points to the red figure.]
The resulting treatment assignments are listed in Table 3.4. To maximize the
degrees of freedom for the analysis, I condense T1-T3 to a common negative vote margin
information treatment, and condense T4-T6 to a common positive vote margin
information treatment. Therefore, my three groups are a negative vote (N=300), a
positive vote (N=276), and a control group (N=576).
Estimating Effects
Comparing attitudes of people in high- versus low-support areas is difficult
without controlling for differences in key characteristics between these two types of
areas. The survey was designed to measure the effect of living in a low-support area
among people who live in similar areas, and likewise for high-support areas. I believe this
is an improvement over existing designs that directly compare supporters and non-
supporters.
The analysis estimates the effect of the information treatment on distributive
expectations and support for taxation. I compare the effect of living in a negative vote
margin district (and receiving negative information) to the effect of living in a positive
91
vote margin district (and receiving positive information) via the following regression
equations:
Yi,k = βPosTreatik + Xik + αik + ϵik
Yi,k = βNegTreatik + Xik + αik + ϵik
Where Yik is 1) respondent i’s expectation of receiving district benefits in district
k and 2) respondent i’s preferred community tax contribution. Xik is a vector of
individual and neighborhood-level controls including age, gender, satisfaction with local
public services, employment status, income, and neighborhood public goods provision
indices. The PosTreat and NegTreat variables are binary indicators that respondent i in
district k received information of a positive or negative vote margin, and αk represents
district fixed effects.
Two separate regressions were run to reflect that the data came from two different
populations of incumbent-leaning and opposition-leaning district dwellers.57. In addition,
including a single regression with a treatment indicator would create a counterfactual
group of untreated respondents in both greater-than-average and lower-than-average
districts, which would preclude the ability to measure positive and negative effects
separately.
Analysis
Did receiving information about a relative vote for the mayor’s party influence the
political attitudes of respondents? In this section, I present the results for the effect of the
57 Recall from Table 3 that there were significant differences between the residents of below-
average and above-average districts overall
92
information treatment on 1) general expectations for district benefits, 2) expectations for
distributive policy, and 3) support for taxation. I evaluate these outcomes in two ways.
First, I measure the extent to which information about an above-average vote shifted
these attitudes positively, and the extent to which information about a below-average vote
shifted them negatively. Then, I measure whether these individual shifts in response to
the treatment were large enough to create significant differences between below- and
above-average districts, compared to those same differences in the control group. The
first measure captures the direct effects of the treatment, while the second validates the
proposition that community voting status produces divergent post-election expectations
among residents.
Figure 3.3 provides an overview of the main average treatment effects of both the
positive treatment (in blue) and the negative treatment (in red). The effects are presented
for three binary outcomes: expectations that living conditions in the district would
improve over the next year, that the district would benefit from tax revenue, and that
politicians will redistribute public funds to everyone in the municipality. The fourth
outcome is the preferred proportion of municipal revenue the respondent thinks should
come from taxing residents.
Overall, Figure 3.3 shows that the negative treatment generated greater effects
than the positive one. General expectations of living conditions were equally influenced,
as the treatments generated borderline significant shifts in either direction. Those
informed of a below-average vote decreased their expectations for improved living
conditions by 6.5 percentage points (95% CI: -15, 1), while those made aware of an
93
above-average vote increased their expectations by 7 percentage points (95% CI: -0.9,
15).
However, respondents reacted much more strongly to the negative treatment in
terms of expectations that their district would benefit from tax revenue. Information of a
below-average vote for the mayor’s party decreased expectations for the district
benefiting by 11 percentage points (95% CI:-19, -3), while information of a positive vote
margin increased expectations by 6 percentage points (95% CI: -0.8, 11). This suggests
that respondents were more likely to expect to be penalized for their community’s vote
against the incumbent than to be rewarded for their support, although both directions are
significant at the 90% level. In addition to supporting H1 and H2, this set of results shows
that respondents connected their district support for the mayor directly to redistributive
outcomes in terms of general local public goods provision, and specifically in terms of
the distribution of tax revenue.
94
Figure 3.3: Difference in mean estimates with 95% confidence intervals (90% in bold).
The variables on the y-axis are 1) expectations that living conditions in the district will
improve over the next year; 2) expectations that the district will benefit from tax revenue;
3) expectations that politicians will distribute public funds to everyone in the
municipality; 4) the preferred proportion out of 100 francs the respondent thinks should
come from taxes on the population.
Separate regressions with district fixed effects and controls are in Table 3.6.1 and
3.6.2. Each model is a logistic regression with a binary dependent variable indicating a
yes response to each outcome measure. The coefficients are odds ratios, denoting the
increase or decrease in the odds of expecting that district conditions will improve, that
district residents will benefit from tax revenue, and that politicians will distribute funds
equally. Table 6.1 shows that the negative treatment effect is only robust to district fixed
effects once we account for controls. Table 6.2 shows that the positive treatment effect
holds with and without controls. The treatment effect detected in the pooled sample is no
95
longer there for the equal redistribution outcome, meaning that within districts, exposure
to relative voting information did not change residents’ expectations that politicians
would distribute public funds equally. That treatment effects are still detectable at the
district level, though weaker and less reliable, provides further evidence that the
treatment produced significant differences in attitudes between treated and control groups
in the same district.
Table 3.6.1 Negative ATE with District Fixed Effects
Dependent variable:
Improve Benefit Equal (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
infotreat -0.241 -0.306* -0.362 -0.425* -0.007 -0.034 (0.173) (0.184) (0.262) (0.254) (0.192) (0.201)
partisan 0.108 0.221 0.170 (0.192) (0.271) (0.214)
age -0.019** -0.032*** 0.004 (0.008) (0.010) (0.008)
yrs edu -0.127 -0.171 -0.158 (0.105) (0.152) (0.114)
female -0.230 -0.106 -0.193 (0.193) (0.268) (0.210)
water 0.197 -0.165 -0.345 (1.359) (1.987) (1.484)
nbhd school 3.701 -6.970* 1.949 (3.154) (4.085) (3.403)
poverty 0.084 0.015 0.084 (0.080) (0.117) (0.089)
Controls? N Y N Y N Y
Note: *p**p***p<0.01
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Table 3.6.2 Positive ATE with District Fixed Effects
Dependent variable:
Improve Benefit Equal (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
infotreat 0.392** 0.470** 0.406* 0.409 0.040 0.001 (0.177) (0.189) (0.243) (0.257) (0.196) (0.208)
partisan 0.236 0.145 0.199 (0.203) (0.274) (0.226)
age -0.009 -0.029*** -0.012* (0.007) (0.009) (0.007)
yrs edu 0.017 -0.044 -0.063 (0.105) (0.142) (0.117)
female -0.111 0.008 -0.053 (0.191) (0.256) (0.212)
water -0.432 -0.940 -0.442 (0.653) (0.783) (0.712)
nbhd school -0.805 3.497 9.337** (3.482) (5.480) (4.329)
poverty -0.202** -0.126 -0.022 (0.089) (0.114) (0.097)
Controls? N Y N Y N Y
Note: *p**p***p<0.01
Next, I measured the effect of the information treatment on expectations of
politicians’ redistributive behavior. To measure perceptions of equal redistribution, the
binary variable indicates a ‘1’ if the respondent expects elected officials in power to
redistribute public funds to all residents in the municipality. My hypothesis predicted that
those who live in districts with a greater number of representatives of the dominant party
are more likely to expect wider redistribution, and that the opposite would hold true in
lower-voting areas, who are more likely to expect political discrimination. The results
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generally confirm the hypothesis for lower-voting areas: the negative treatment decreased
expectations that politicians would redistribute public funds to everyone by 6 percentage
points (95% CI: -11, -0.4). However, the positive treatment had no significant effect on
expectations, although the estimate shifted in the expected direction. As in the last test,
negative effects outstripped positive effects, suggesting that citizens are more sensitive to
expected losses than to expected gains.5859
My fourth hypothesis related the information treatment to an increase or decrease
in support for tax policy. Figure 3.3 shows that while the positive and negative
treatments did shift the preferred tax rate in the expected directions, it was not enough to
reject the null for H4b. The rest of the analysis looks at further testing to understand why
there were no significant average treatment effects on tax preference.
58 This finding supports a large set of research regarding prospect theory, which predicts that
individuals overweight expected losses relative to expected gains. 59 The results of an OLS regression are presented for this test, but the appendix contains results of
a multinomial logit regression which shows that the negative treatment induced respondents to
move away from expectations of “everyone” as a recipient of public funds to “only some part” of
the population. I interpret this move to mean an increase in perceptions of unequal redistribution,
as residents in comparatively lower voting districts do not anticipate belonging to the part of the
population that will receive the benefit of public funds from elected officials in power.
98
Figure 3.4: Difference in mean estimates with 95% confidence intervals (90% in gray).
The first estimate is the difference in means between below-average and above-average
districts in the control condition. The second estimate is the difference in means between
below-average and above-average districts in the treatment condition. The variables on
the y-axis are 1) expectations that living conditions in the district will improve over the
next year; 2) expectations that the district will benefit from tax revenue; 3) expectations
that politicians will distribute public funds to everyone in the municipality; 4) the
preferred proportion out of 100 francs the respondent thinks should come from taxes on
the population.
Figure 3.4 presents the results for my second outcome measure: whether the
treatment induced significant differences in the attitudes of residents of districts that
voted just below or just above the municipal average for the mayor’s party. The
differences in below versus above average districts in the control groups are in orange.
There were no differences in expectations of district improvements, or in the preferred
tax rate between these two groups. Residents of lower-voting districts were actually more
likely to expect that their district would benefit from tax revenue, and that politicians
99
distribute public funds evenly in the control group. In the treatment condition, below-
average district respondents scored significantly lower on all of these measures. They
were 8.7 percentage points (95% CI: -17 , -0.3 ) less likely expect their living conditions
to improve, 7.2 percentage points (95% CI: -15, 0.9) less likely to expect their district to
benefit from tax revenue, and 11 percentage points (95% CI: -17, -5) less likely to expect
equal redistribution to all residents.
While the separate treatment effects were not significant in the first test, both
positive and negative treatments combined produced a significant divergence in the
preferred tax rate: treated respondents in below-average districts preferred 3.7 CFA less
than treated respondents in above-average districts, an almost four percent difference.
This is the amount in tax revenue potentially foregone by residents discouraged
from paying their taxes. This amount is not negligible considering that an average daily
ticket fee to use public market space is 25 CFA. Over the course of a week of ticket
collections, the four-franc difference is equivalent to one less ticket collected. Tax
evasion in Benin is plausible and prevalent. My interviews with bureaucratic officials and
tax collectors provided many ways citizens avoid paying taxes. Small business owners
can simply avoid or hide from tax collectors collecting tickets, they can choose not to
show up to city hall to pay their mailed tax notices, or they can bribe or even threaten tax
collectors. Furthermore, in a country where 36% make less than 1,000 CFA (2 USD) a
day, the motivation to pay taxes and fees, no matter how small, is already low.60 Low
incomes are similarly reflected in my survey sample. While I do not have income data on
60 World Bank WDI statistics.
100
household survey respondents, 57% of business owners surveyed (N=257) reported
making less than 5,000 CFA (10 USD) a day in profits. A significant portion of that
group is likely to make less than 1,000 CFA a day in profits. Thus, small taxes and fees
can add up to a considerable chunk of their income.
Finally, small CFA amounts of tax revenue foregone can have significant
consequences at the macro level. For instance, an equivalent four percent decrease in
locally generated revenue for the municipality of Porto-Novo, the nation’s capital, would
be about 21 million CFA (37,600 USD) in 2014. It is also equivalent to just under twice
Porto-Novo’s 2014 expenses on materials for infrastructure projects in the municipality at
12.3 million CFA. Consequently, discouraged residents of opposition-leaning areas can
significantly decrease the amount of revenue municipalities can collect by withholding
their payments, thereby shrinking already insufficient sources of public funding for goods
and services.61 how much are the results due to municipal variation
Lastly, I test part one of my fourth hypothesis, which predicted a positive
relationship between district vote shares and support for taxation. I pooled my sample of
above- and below-average district respondents to get the full range of observed district
vote shares for the mayor’s party in each municipality. I then regressed the tax
contribution variable on district vote share in Table 3.6.62 As expected, there is a positive
relationship between local support for the ruling party and preferred tax rates. This
61 Source for Porto-Novo budget statistics: Bordereaux de Developpement from the Ministry of
Finance, obtained July 2015. 62 Table [tab:distvote] contains regressions using hierarchical linear models, with observations
clustered at the district level. The same results are obtained using district fixed effects instead of
HLM.
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relationship holds true at the municipal level: residents in municipalities with higher
mayor vote shares show more willingness for citizens to be taxed by their local
government. Indeed, district-level tax preferences are mainly driven by municipal effects:
once I introduce municipal fixed effects in the control group regression, district vote
share is no longer significant in predicting preferred tax rates. The regression confirms
that there was no significant district-level variation in tax preferences in the control
group. This is important to establish in the baseline group in order to properly measure
any effects of the treatment at the district level. Column 4 of Table 3.6 shows that the
treatment was effective in generating within-municipal, district-level variation in tax
preferences: even after accounting for municipal fixed effects, treated respondents in
higher vote share district had higher preferred tax contributions. The positive and
significant district vote share coefficient in Model 4 is a confirmation of H4a. A one
percentage point increase in district vote share is associated with a 0.16 CFA increase in
the amount of tax treated respondents think the government should collect from citizens.
Going from a district with a 15% vote share for the mayor’s party (10th percentile) to one
with an 88% vote share (90th percentile) increases the preferred tax amount from 26 CFA
to 39 CFA, a 50% increase.
The results in Table 3.6 suggest two things. First, the structural relationship
suggests that residents of low-voting districts have already hit a floor: they are expressing
tax preferences that are well below the mean preferred tax contributions. Residents of
mid- and high-incumbent voting districts, however, express greater willingness to tolerate
taxation. This is the group that may be swayed by relative information about their
community vote. While this proposition is not a part of the original set of hypotheses, it
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would serve to confirm observable implications of the theory: that relative vote
differences are likely to matter most to citizens when they expect to be rewarded or
punished by an incumbent with plausible discretionary power.
To test whether respondents were more sensitive to information about relative
vote in higher vote share districts, I once again split the sample into the original two
groups: below- and above-average voting districts. In each group, I introduced an
interaction term between the treatment indicator and district vote share in Table 3.7 in
the appendix. A visual interpretation of the interaction coefficients in each model of
Table 3.7 is presented in Figure 3.5. The negative treatment significantly lowered
preferred tax rates in higher vote share districts; and the positive treatment significantly
raised preferred tax rates in higher vote share districts. The treatment effects become
significant around the 60% district vote share mark, where support for the mayor’s party
is more visible63 and more likely to matter to residents who are determining eligibility for
redistribution, and thus calculating the benefit of taxation. That both treatments were
more effective in higher vote share districts makes intuitive sense. The perceived benefits
(or punishment) of association with the mayor should increase in the mayor’s overall
popularity and ability to use his discretion.64
63 As opposed to the arbitrary 40% vote threshold for majority district seats 64 By design, districts with low voteshares for the mayor’s party were also in municipalities with
low voteshares for the mayor’s party, such that district vote shareand municipal vote shareare
correlated by 0.81 (95% CI: 0.8, 0.83). In terms of citizen perceptions, there is a 0.11 (p=0.01)
correlation between a respondent’s district vote shareand the respondent’s estimate of municipal
support for the mayor. Those in higher district vote shareareas perceive higher popularity of the
mayor.
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Figure 3.5: Change in predicted value of preferred citizen tax contribution as a function
of district vote share with 95% confidence intervals. The left graph shows the effect of
the negative treatment in below-average districts; the right graph shows the effect of the
positive treatment in above-average districts. Triangles indicate observed values of
district vote shares in each sample.
The change in predicted tax amounts is a concrete measure of the extent to which
relative community vote considerations influence support for local taxation. The positive
finding is especially encouraging because it suggests a potentially positive spillover of
clientelist logic. That is, likely beneficiaries of clientelism may be more encouraged to
pay taxes when they are reminded of their beneficiary status. The negative finding,
however, is more discouraging: being reminded of a relatively lower vote, even in areas
that highly voted for the mayor’s party, was enough to decrease the preferred tax of
residents that would otherwise have given higher tax rates.
Models 1 and 3 of Table 3.7 in the appendix show the regressions with just the
treatment indicator. As in Figure 3, the treatment had no effect on its own. District vote
shares are also positively associated with preferred tax amounts, as in the pooled sample.
Negative Treatment Positive Treatment
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In Models 2 and 4, the interaction term in each group is significant: the negative
treatment significantly lowered preferred tax rates in higher vote share districts; and the
positive treatment significantly raised preferred tax rates in higher vote share districts.
That both treatments were more effective in higher vote share districts makes intuitive
sense. The perceived benefits (or punishment) of association with the mayor should
increase in the mayor’s overall popularity and ability to use his discretion.65
Alternative Explanations
Alternative explanations are important to consider for two reasons. First, they may better
explain redistributive expectations than my relative community vote measure overall.
Second, they may be correlated with below- or above-average district status in ways that
predict a negative response to the negative treatment and a positive response to the
positive treatment. I find little evidence that this is the case, as the alternatives either do
not take away the significance of my main variables, or do not overlap with below- or
above-average district status.
Co-ethnicity can determine expectations for redistribution to the extent that co-
ethnics of incumbents expect favoritism (Franck and Rainer 2012; Burgess et al. 2015).
The link between ethnicity and taxation in Africa is articulated by Lieberman (2003),
whose theory states that ethnic homogeneity increases the likelihood that tax revenue
benefits the in-group, while ethnic diversity increases the likelihood that tax revenue will
65 By design, districts with low voteshares for the mayor’s party were also in municipalities with
low voteshares for the mayor’s party, such that district vote shareand municipal vote shareare
correlated by 0.81 (95% CI: 0.8, 0.83). In terms of citizen perceptions, there is a 0.11 (p=0.01)
correlation between a respondent’s district vote shareand the respondent’s estimate of municipal
support for the mayor. Those in higher district vote shareareas perceive higher popularity of the
mayor.
105
benefit out-groups. Kasara (2007) also finds that national leaders tax their co-ethnic
farmers more through indirect taxes on cash crops enacted by marketing boards. Thus,
ethnicity may also play a significant role if negative vote margin districts are
disproportionately of smaller, minority ethnic groups. Table 3.8 of the Appendix shows
similar proportions of the Fon ethnic group in below- and above-average voting districts.
Respondents disproportionately belong to the Fon ethnic group, the dominant ethnic
group in southern Benin. The inclusion of both a mayor co-ethnic indicator and a Fon
ethnic group indicator in the main model specifications are not significant. This makes
intuitive sense given that minority ethnic groups are more likely to be spread out in small
neighborhoods rather than concentrated in entire districts.
Income may also explain part of the results. On one hand, poorer respondents may
be more resistant to taxation if they perceive themselves as unable to pay. On the other
hand, richer respondents may be more anti-tax if they are more likely to substitute public
services for private ones, such as the use of electricity generators. I find that income
measures are not correlated with expectations that conditions in the district will improve,
or with the respondent’s preferred tax rate. Comparing the incomes of those in below-
and above-average vote districts, I do find that residents in below-average districts scored
lower on several income index measures than those in above-average districts. Since the
majority of the tests in this study were done within districts, however, these cross-district
measures are unlikely to account for the results. In each of the regression tables in the
empirical section, I show that the average treatment effect is not being driven by a
particular income group as the income coefficient is not widely significant. Further
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estimation of average treatment effects by income level shows that no particular income
level is driving the results.
Residents of below- and above-average vote districts do differ in their perceptions
of public service quality or evaluations of local government performance. In Table 3.3 of
the appendix, those in higher vote districts report have higher satisfaction ratings than
lower vote districts, but the two are similarly low on a Likert scale where 1 indicates
strong dissatisfaction. Given widespread dissatisfaction, the inclusion of this measure in
main regressions is not significant.
It could be the case that below-average districts tend to be in the periphery, and
that above-average districts tend to be in more central locations. If so, then the effects
detected in the survey could be due to differing perspectives in center versus peripheral
areas that may simultaneously vary in the quality of services local governments are able
to provide. I verify that this is not the case in Table 3.9, which reports the average
distance of each district to the municipal district that contains the city hall. I show that on
overage, under-voting districts were no closer to the city hall than over-voting districts.
Within municipalities, however, there were differences: some had under-voting districts
that were farther away, while others were closer to the city hall. On average these
differences evened out.
Conclusion
Repeated exposure to clientelist appeals shapes attitudes and preferences beyond
vote choice. In Benin, tax appeals trigger clientelist expectations for the redistribution of
revenue, which in turn shape support for tax policy. I find substantial negative effects on
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trust in political leaders and increased pessimism from residents in areas that did not
support the incumbent and who expected to be penalized for their lack of support. The
fact that negative effects of the treatment were obtainable a year and a half after elections
suggests that ideas about political discrimination and inequality are persistent. Therefore,
when political leaders who use clientelist appeals and strategies during campaigns will
find it difficult to convince the very same citizens they previously excluded from
clientelist bargains to support their tax efforts. If we believe the positive participatory
benefits of taxation as a social contract between state and citizen, then this suggests that
key subgroups of the population are opting out of that contract and choosing to disengage
with a local government that they perceive does not work for them.
However, the results also point to possible enhancing positive effects: by
increasing expectations for redistribution, clientelist logic can help encourage tax
payments as well as discourage. Governments trying to encourage tax compliance may
take note of these positive spillovers on tax attitudes. This discussion is merited given the
theorized benefits of taxation for citizen engagement, bargaining power, and political
accountability (Tilly 1992; Moore 2008; Martin 2014; Paler 2013), and the positive
returns of taxation to fund critical public services while reducing dependence on foreign
aid. As scholars are increasingly interested in both the drivers (Bodea and LeBas 2014)
and the implications (Dunning et al. 2015) of citizen tax payment in developing
countries, it adds to our understanding of the motivations for tax (non)compliance. In the
next two chapters, I investigate whether the momentary boosts in expectations and
willingness to pay tax observed among likely clientelist beneficiaries translate to pro-tax
behavior.
108
Chapter 3 Works Cited
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Municipal Elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03.” The Journal of Modern
African Studies 44 (04). Cambridge Univ Press: 543–71.
Bleck, Jaimie, and Nicolas Van de Walle. 2013. “Valence Issues in African Elections:
Navigating Uncertainty and the Weight of the Past.” Comparative Political Studies 46
(11). SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: 1394–1421.
Bodea, Cristina, and Adrienne LeBas. 2014. “The Origins of Voluntary Compliance:
Attitudes Toward Taxation in Urban Nigeria.” British Journal of Political Science.
Cambridge Univ Press, 1–24.
Burgess, Robin, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria, and others. 2015. “The
Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya.” The American Economic
Review 105 (6). American Economic Association: 1817–51.
Dunning, Thad, Felipe Monestier, Rafael Piñeiro, Fernando Rosenblatt, and Guadalupe
Tuñón. 2015. “Positive Vs. Negative Incentives for Compliance: Evaluating a
Randomized Tax Holiday in Uruguay.”
Franck, Raphael, and Ilia Rainer. 2012. “Does the Leader’s Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic
Favoritism, Education, and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa.” American Political Science
Review 106 (02). Cambridge Univ Press: 294–325.
Ichino, Nahomi, and Noah L Nathan. 2013. “Crossing the Line: Local Ethnic Geography
and Voting in Ghana.” American Political Science Review 107 (02). Cambridge Univ
Press: 344–61.
Kasara, Kimuli. 2007. “Tax Me If You Can: Ethnic Geography, Democracy, and the
Taxation of Agriculture in Africa.” American Political Science Review 101 (01).
Cambridge Univ Press: 159–72.
Kitschelt, Herbert. 2000. “Linkages Between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic
Polities.” Comparative Political Studies 33 (6-7). Sage Publications: 845–79.
Levi, Margaret. 1988. Of Rule and Revenue. Univ of California Press.
Levi, Margaret, Audrey Sacks, and Tom Tyler. 2009. “Conceptualizing Legitimacy,
Measuring Legitimating Beliefs.” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (3). Sage
Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: 354–75.
Lieberman, Evan S. 2003. Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and
South Africa. Cambridge University Press.
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Lupu, Noam, Rachel Beatty Riedl, Jaimie Bleck, and Nicolas van de Walle. 2013.
“Valence Issues in African Elections: Navigating Uncertainty and the Weight of the
Past.” Comparative Political Studies 46 (11). SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles,
CA: 1394–1421.
Martin, Lucy. 2014. “Taxation, Loss Aversion, and Accountability: Theory and
Experimental Evidence for Taxation’s Effect on Citizen Behavior.” working paper, Yale
University Department of Political Science. Available: https://docs. google. com/viewer.
Meltzer, Allan H, and Scott F Richard. 1981. “A Rational Theory of the Size of
Government.” Journal of Political Economy 89 (5). The University of Chicago Press:
914–27.
Moore, Mick. 2008. “Between Coercion and Contract: Competing Narratives on Taxation
and Governance.” Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries, 34–63.
Paler, Laura. 2013. “Keeping the Public Purse: An Experiment in Windfalls, Taxes, and
the Incentives to Restrain Government.” American Political Science Review 107 (04).
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Romer, Thomas. 1975. “Individual Welfare, Majority Voting, and the Properties of a
Linear Income Tax.” Journal of Public Economics 4 (2). Elsevier: 163–85.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital and European States. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Tyler, Tom R. 1990. “Why People Obey the Law: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and
Compliance.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge university press.
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Chapter 3 Survey Codebook Excerpts
Variable Question Coding
Scheme
district_benefit
_rev
The city hall must decide how to distribute its
spending across the districts in the entire
commune. In this district, how much do you
think people will benefit from the commune’s
tax revenue?
4 A great deal
3 Somewhat
2 A little
1 Not at all
politicians_redist Which of the following statements is closest to
your views when it comes to the commune in
general?
Statement 1: Local elected officials only use
public funds to benefit themselves.
Statement 2: Local elected officials use public
funds to benefit only some people or
neighborhoods in the commune.
Statement 3: Local elected officials
use public funds to benefit everyone
in the commune.
preferred tax rat The money local government gets from taxes is
often not enough to cover all expenses, so the
city hall must look for other sources of income
to complete the budget. Think about the entire
budget of the local government. In the next
picture, can you show me how much of the
budget you think should come from residents
like you, relative to what the government
should try to bring in from other sources?
A larger value signifies a larger contribution
from taxpayers.
0 - 100
general expect How would you describe the chances that the
following items in this district improve over the
rest of the local council’s tenure?
(1) Living conditions of residents in this
district?
(2) City hall channels more investment into this
district
5 Very likely
4 Somewhat
likely
3 Neither
likely
nor unlikely
2 Somewhat
unlikely
1 Very
unlikely
111
Chapter 4: Views from the State
I have so far offered a citizen-centered view of taxation, presenting attitudinal
measures showing that their clientelist expectations are systematic and apply to taxation
issues. Yet citizens are only one set in a three-actor exchange that also includes
politicians who set tax policies, and the bureaucrats who implement them. In this chapter
I ask, how do these state actors respond to the pressures of taxpayers’ clientelist
expectations?
This question is important to answer as a key part of my theoretical argument
presenting a demand-driven view of clientelist exchange whereby citizens exert pressure
on politicians to curb state authority. In order for citizens’ clientelist demands to be
effective, therefore, they must carry substantial weight among politicians.
I offer qualitative evidence that this is indeed the case, as politicians anticipate
that citizens will reason in a clientelist fashion and formulate tax policy to accommodate
those expectations. Through personal interviews with politicians in Adjarra, Ouidah, and
Porto-Novo, I show that their expectations about citizen resistance to taxes create
incentives for lax (or no) enforcement.
Via interviews and focus groups of bureaucrats and tax collectors, I show that
politicians then use their political control over the bureaucracy to their advantage,
directing their local state apparatus to act in ways that will not upset their political base.
Thus, bureaucrats’ actions are constrained by the political priorities of their patronage
benefactors, further crippling their enforcement power while increasing taxpayer agency
to disregard their authority.
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Lastly, I show the consequences of these politicized policy choices on the tax
collection process via a survey of tax collectors on their interactions with taxpayers,
which offers insight on citizen tax behaviors. The survey findings suggest that the biggest
constraints on tax collection come from incumbents’ political supporters, indicating that
clientelist beneficiaries who are pro-tax in theory may be best positioned to resist or
evade taxes in practice.
Political Disincentives
I interviewed district councilors, or Chefs d’Arrondissement (CA), in the
municipalities of Adjarra, Ouidah, and Porto-Novo66 in December 2016. These cities
were three of the five survey sites I visited, and are all on or near the southern coast of
Benin.
The cynicism expressed by voters was equally present among politicians, as they
anticipated that voters only want to receive, without contributing to public goods. A
councilmember in Adjarra’s 2nd District states it plainly: “This is what my constituents
understand: when they are unable to eat, they come, and you must give them something
to eat” (CA-Adjarra II). This mentality, he reasons, leads citizens to prioritize their rights
rather than their obligations. To combat this issue, elected officials often fall back on
what I call the myth of public awareness, or the belief that public information campaigns
are necessary to teach citizens about civic values.67 The same councilmember adds that
66 Due to limited access, no mayors were formally interviewed for this study, but I informally met
with the mayors of Bohicon, Klouekanme, and Zagnanado (South-Central Benin). 67 I elaborate on this point in Chapter 1, where I argue that this idea is a guiding assumption
behind tax morale theories that predict individuals will be more compliant if they understand the
link between taxation and public goods. However, Afrobarometer surveys show that citizens are
well aware of and understand the fiscal contract, as well as the function and value of taxation.
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“information is a must. We must educate them on the principals of citizenship, both their
rights and their responsibilities” (CA-Adjarra II). This assessment is equally shared by
the technical bureaucrats working in the administrations, like the Secretary General of the
municipality of Toffo: “They think the municipality will help them solve their problems,
not burden them with more charges.” With such cynical perceptions of citizens’
unwillingness to pay, one would expect politicians to be reticent to enforce tax policy.
Accordingly, politicians express difficulties in convincing citizens to contribute to
taxes. A councilmember in Ouidah’s 3rd District explains his background, establishing the
deep roots he has in the community: “I was born here, and have lived here more than 50
years. I’m well known here. Despite the fact that I’m among them, it’s difficult to
convince them.” Even these longstanding pillars of the community, who often act as local
brokers with high amounts of social capital, struggle to persuade their constituents to pay
taxes. When asked about citizen responses to his tax campaign efforts, he responded that
residents “turn their back on you,” and resigned himself to the fact that “there are people
who haven’t paid for years.”
Politicians are thus incentivized to not enforce tax payments for fear of their
supporters “turning their back” on them and losing them to the opposition. These types of
strategic calculations are at the forefront of politicians’ minds. In Ouidah, the councilors I
spoke with were frank about the electoral costs of enforcement. One councilor in
Ouidah’s 4th District offered a common example of informal vendors’ use of public space
during the holidays, or people occupying public roads for funerals and ceremonies. “Do
Civic mindedness is not the missing link, but rather trust that the government will follow through
on its end of the contract.
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you think as CA you can go to the streets to ask them to stop? They’ll say, ‘I won’t vote
for this CA because he chased me out of the street,’” the councilor predicted.
Anticipating the negative electoral costs, he adds: “The CA has to do it, but it makes him
unpopular.”
In both Adjarra and Ouidah, councilors also gave examples of their constituents
making direct links between voting and taxation. They either “chastise you during the
elections,” or they “come to you with favors: now that I’ve paid [my taxes], I need money
for my child” (CA Ouidah 3). In a surprising twist, some citizens therefore see their
personal tax contribution as grounds for further continuation of private transfers. This
leaves elected officials in the tough position of curtailing tax enforcement for key
supporters. “If we don’t, our constituents will call us to tell them [tax agents] ‘he’s my
supporter, so leave him alone’” (CA Adjarra 2). In such cases, district councilors report
receiving phone calls from supporters to call off the tax collectors that attempt to collect
from them. Not only do politicians endure penalties for tax enforcement, but they must
also respond to direct demands for tax exemption benefits from their political clients.
The issue is so rampant in Porto-Novo that the deputy mayor berated her own
colleagues for failing to enforce boat parking fees along the city’s lagoon during a
December 2016 council meeting I attended that was especially devoted to municipal tax
issues. As she proposed raising rates on these and other municipal fees, she was met by
resistance from other councilors who anticipated public protests in their constituencies in
response to the proposed hikes in fees. She was forced to back down from her position, in
a clear instance of a politician bowing to political pressure when making enforcement
decisions.
115
Politicians’ sensitivity to taxes and their negative consequences for political
survival are equally apparent to local bureaucrats. Speaking of the politicians in his
municipality, a Chief Tax Administrator explains: “We’re the dominant party, so we’re
the ones in power. So to avoid giving the opposition something to say, they [politicians]
tell us ‘what you’re doing is good enough, no more’” (FG 0515, chef). Higher-level
bureaucrats who are in close contact with mayors confirm the same narrative. The
Secretary General of the municipality of So-Ava concurs: “There’s a lack of political
will. The mayor and CAs don’t want to attack their own base so they leave them be.”
Political Control of the Bureaucracy
Not only do elected officials face strong disincentives to enforce tax laws and
other regulations, they also have the means to curb enforcement via their control over the
bureaucracy.
In Chapter 3, I discussed the central role of the mayor as the ultimate executive
authority. This is especially apparent in terms of bureaucratic control, where mayors in
Benin have sole authority to hire and fire bureaucratic administrators, including tax
collectors. As a result, the primary way to get a job in the bureaucracy is to have political
or family connections to the mayor or elected council members. For example,
bureaucratic tax collectors can be picked because they are former campaign activists of
the mayor, or because they are relatives of the mayor. Anecdotal accounts suggest that
this type of recruitment is the most common.
To better understand how clientelist considerations affect the administrative
process of tax collection, I conducted focus groups in May 2015 of both high-level
116
bureaucrats (heads of economic affairs in their respective municipalities) and low-level
tax collectors, the frontline bureaucratic hires who interact with citizens daily to collect
payments. I share the focus group content in this section to illustrate how politician
control over the bureaucracy exerts pressure on bureaucrats to curtail tax activity.
In anticipation of citizen complaints outlined above, politicians (especially
mayors) use their control over the bureaucracy to preempt costly tax activities. Mayors
are able to do so because they enjoy total discretion over administrative hiring. As one
focus group participant explains: “The mayor is in control of the agents of the
administration, so he has the power to nominate, recruit, and hire people. For example, if
the budget calls for hiring 10 new people, it’s the mayor who decides” (FG 0515, chef).
“The recruitment process is anarchy,” says another. “You can have a degree in
geographic history and still be in the department of economic affairs without a problem.
It depends on your relationship with the mayor” (FG 0515, chef).
Such an extent of political control necessarily politicizes local taxation, as
politicians want to avoid harsh fiscal measures to get re-elected. Under the patronage ties
between politicians and bureaucrats, the agent behaves not as a public agent of the state
serving the state, but as an agent of the politician to whom he owes his job. They can use
their position to confer favors in the form of lax enforcement in order to avoid hurting
their political patron's popularity, and therefore their own source of influence.
In sum, we may see lax bureaucratic enforcement for two reasons.
The first is that politicians can actively act to derail tax collection by reinforcing
clientelist contracts based on tax exemptions, or by simply withholding the resources tax
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agents need to do their jobs. The bureaucrats I interviewed acknowledged this power
imbalance, expressing displeasure with politicians: “We the technocrats are not in a
position of power. For them [politicians], the revenue is there, there’s money to ‘eat.’”
(FG 0515, chef). Facing political pressure from above, bureaucrats expressed the severe
constraints on their work: “They make it so that you cannot work. They can stop
collection in its tracks. You go in an area, and the mayor calls you to say no, turn around”
(FG 0515, chef). In So-Ava, a resource-strapped lakeside municipality, the Secretary
General complains about the lack of material support from the administration: “When we
say we need boats to get around, they don’t listen to us. There’s freedom to do the work,
but in subtle ways they don’t give us the means to do it.”
Due to political control, we may see weak enforcement because bureaucrats’
incentives are aligned with those of politicians. As patronage beneficiaries, what is
politically expedient for their patrons is also good for them. These bureaucrats may also
feel more protected by their patrons, thereby decreasing their incentives to work hard at
their jobs. Speaking of mayoral hires in his administration, the Secretary General of
Cotonou states that he can always tell the political affiliation of certain agents: “They’re
more at ease, at times they bypass you, they’re not scared. They’re confident in what will
happen to them, so they think everything is allowed.” Although such employee
complaints are to be expected from someone in an executive management position, there
are clear ramifications of political hires for both the capacity and will to do the tough job
of tax collection well.
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Consequences for Tax Collection
When political and bureaucratic incentives for weak enforcement converge, it can
impede tax collection by undercutting the authority of collection agents in the field. This
in turn breeds conditions ripe for citizen resistance. I now highlight several ways in
which tax collectors have low bargaining power vis-à-vis taxpayers in Benin. As frontline
enforcers, tax collectors are best positioned to witness citizen reactions to taxation in the
field. These reactions often serve to constrain their capacity to collect taxes.
Tax collectors are especially vulnerable to the dynamics of political control, as
they are at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy. They are typically low-skilled
natives of the community in which they work. They tend to be low-educated (primary
and some secondary), middle-aged, and have a lack of other job prospects. This profile
makes them easily replaceable and introduced a certain amount of job insecurity that
constrains their actions.
While deep social ties give collectors local knowledge to identify and pursue
potential taxpayers, it also introduces a sense of familiarity or even contempt among
taxpayers. The most common citizen reaction when meeting a tax agent is to express
skepticism, especially if they knew the agent before his job at the city hall. This severely
undercuts the agent’s authority and his ability to enforce tax obligations. Citizens will use
the prior connections—usually a familial or friendship tie—to shame or discredit the
agent’s attempt to collect. Tax collectors in the focus group meeting mentioned being
powerless to enforce taxes on friends, family, or other connections. Thus, common social
ties can serve as a source of strong enforcement problems among tax agents. One focus
group participant notes that “the job is harder for us because we come from the area, and
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it’s hard to convince these taxpayers to pay us. But when it comes to central tax agents
that go in the same places, it has a more dissuasive effect. People pay. They pay correctly
when they see that it’s the central government that has come to them.” (FG 0515, chef)
Although tax collectors have authority as agents of the local government, their
social proximity to residents opens up opportunities for citizens to actively display their
resistance to local taxes. As a result, agents can face verbal or physical aggression from
dissatisfied citizens when trying to do their jobs. One collector explains: “The politicians
don’t make it easy for us. For example, in the market, the women refuse to pay their
tickets, because they’ll have politicians at city hall, and they count on their relatives to
protect them. If you try to insist, there’ll be fights between the women and the tax
collectors” (FG 0515, agent). In addition to politician monitoring, political surveillance of
tax collectors can come from taxpayers themselves. Politicians have reliable information
about where tax collectors have been and who they have targeted, and they can preempt
or sabotage their collection activity.
Tax collectors also witness the politicized nature citizens attach to taxation, as
they are privy to taxpayers’ various reasonings for non-payment. In a particularly
egregious example, the Director of Tax Administration in Cotonou first offers a
familiarly pessimistic view of taxpayer reasoning based on the over 1,000 tax agents
under his watch: “People tell themselves, since they voted for the mayor and it’s thanks
to them that he’s in power, he no longer has the right to ask them for anything.” He goes
on further to state how mayoral supporters use this reasoning to their advantage:
“Partisans themselves point the finger at their neighbors and say, ‘go to them, they didn’t
vote for the mayor so it’s them you should tax.’” This is an example of the shrewd ways
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in which political clients seek to capitalize on their status to demand tax exemption
benefits. In the section that follows and in the next chapter, I measure how widespread
these incidents may be and estimate the consequences for tax capacity building.
It is important to note that in practice, collectors are far from being completely
constrained, as they have many opportunities for personal profit. Social connections can
provide a basis for collusion to evade taxes, and interview and focus group participants
gave many examples of illegal activity. The most common methods are to offer a lower
fine in exchange for a bribe, or to overcharge clients and pocket the difference. Another
way collectors may exercise discretion is through tax assessments. Collectors physically
appraise public space, vendor merchandise, homes and other properties to create the tax
base. They have discretion over who will make it onto the list, and how much they will
be put down as owing. It is at this stage that fiscal evasion is also most likely to occur.
Collectors directly, and in many cases privately, interact with local residents and can
negotiate over the payment owed and the worth of the appraised merchandise or property.
Field Survey: Citizen Reactions to Taxation
The anecdotal evidence from focus groups and interview respondents paints an
extremely politicized view of taxation going from top elected officials to low-level tax
collectors. I set out to conduct a survey of tax collectors especially designed to measure
the extent to which these testimonials represent common occurrences. I selected three
municipalities as survey sites that vary in income, population, urban, and tax capacity,
summarized in Table 1.
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Abomey-Calavi is the largest and wealthiest commune of the three, with a
population of over half a million. Situated right next to the country's economic capital, it
is a hub of economic activity and is home to both rich and poor in a semi-urban setting.
In terms of bureaucratic capacity, the commune has 74 tax collectors and is the only one
to have a partially digitized tax registry. There are about a dozen collection teams to
cover the commune’s nine districts, although activity is concentrated in the two districts
closest to Cotonou.
Ouidah, a popular tourist destination, is a moderately wealthy commune with a
population of about 150,000 and just 16 collectors. Tax collection is also concentrated in
the city’s major areas of economic activity, and tapers off in more rural and isolated
parts.
Toffo is the poorest commune with a population of about 100,000. It is sparsely
populated and entirely rural, with just 8 tax collectors on staff and very limited resources
for collection. Both Toffo and Ouidah rely more heavily on taxation of natural resources
like quarries and agricultural products, while Abomey-Calavi relies more on taxing
business activity.
Despite these differences, tax collection looks roughly the same in each location,
divided into three domains. Tax collectors visit merchants and small businesses to collect
license and advertising fees; they visit local markets to collect vendor fees; and they visit
homes to conduct property appraisals of homes and businesses. The survey questions
pertained to tax collectors’ experiences during these visits.
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Table 4.1: Descriptive Statistics of Survey Communes
Population
(2013)
Percent
Urban
Poverty
Rate
% Access
to running
water
Number of
Tax
Collectors
Tax
Collectors
Surveyed
Abomey-
Calavi
655,965 74 25.8 48.29 74 40
Ouidah 161,544 50 32.4 39.67 16 13
Toffo 100,920 0 42.3 1.35 8 5
The intended survey population was the total number of tax collectors in each
municipality. Of the total 98 agents, 58 were willing and available to be surveyed (40
agents in Abomey-Calavi, 13 in Ouidah, and 5 in Toffo).68 Survey enumerators traveled
with me in teams to the three communes. They talked individually to collectors at their
place of work at the local city hall, the marketplaces, and stone quarries in the communes.
The conversations were individual but often in the presence of others including other tax
collectors, friends, even supervisors. The survey was designed with this lack of privacy in
mind.
Enumerators had a limited amount of time, as collectors had to wait to be
interviewed before going into the field. The average interview lasted about 20 minutes.
We did not reach all tax collectors in each commune because the survey was voluntary
and not all collectors were onsite and available. Thus, my sample of 58 is not
representative and only contains those who were willing and available to be surveyed.
68 The most efficient strategy was to visit collectors at their place of work at the local city hall, the
marketplaces, and sand quarries in the communes. I designed the survey keeping in mind the
open setting and avoided asking direct sensitive questions. I supplemented answers to possibly
sensitive survey questions with the data from taped focus group meetings where collectors spoke
freely and candidly about their experiences in the field.
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I asked tax collectors how often they encounter each of the following citizen
behaviors during a typical week of collection: calling or appealing to an influential
connection, 69 refusing to pay, uniting with others to protest, insulting agents, and using
physical force against agents. Table 2 lists the relative frequency of each type of action
reported by an individual collector and clearly establishes variation in my main
dependent variable of interest, citizen resistance. There is a general citizen resentment
towards taxes, as 88 percent of collectors report receiving insults and 67 percent report
receiving refusals often or every day. There is, however, divergence in how citizens
express their resentment: they either choose to protest, call their political connections, or
use force. It is this divergence in citizen responses to tax and fee payments that I seek to
explain.
Table 4.2. Weekly Occurrences of Citizen Behaviors
Never Once or
twice
A few
times
Often/every
day
Total
Call influential
person
14% 12% 26% 40% 100%
Refuse to pay 3% 7% 22% 67% 100%
United protest 24% 16% 34% 26% 100%
Insults 2% -- 10% 88% 100%
Force 16% 23% 23% 39% 100%
I then asked collectors about the relative frequency of enforcement actions they
take over the course of a typical month. Table 3 shows that the most common actions
taken are to simply return another time, or report the incident to a supervisor. The
69 I refer to an "influential" person to avoid singling out the mayor or other council members by
name, but it is generally understood that influential people are the politicians who have authority
over the administration. In focus group meetings, collectors reported that some citizens who are
family, relations, or other close supporters of the mayor call him directly on the phone.
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response patterns help to dismiss coercion as the motivation for citizen resistance
(Fjeldstad 2001), as forced recovery and police calls are less common. Instead, it seems
citizens can resist with some level of impunity, indicating perhaps the tacit acquiescence
of the communal administration to their demands.
Table 4.3. Monthly Occurrences of Collector Enforcement Types
Never Once or
twice
A few
times
Often/every
day
Total
Return another time 18% 10% 16% 56% 100%
Call supervisor 14% 11% 19% 56% 100%
Forced recovery 14% 21% 44% 21% 100%
Call police/security 26% 23% 39% 12% 100%
Next, I introduced a series of questions to uncover what types of citizens tended
to resist payment the most. Collectors were asked how much they felt they could
personally convince the following citizens to pay: a supporter of the mayor or his party, a
wealthy property owner, a friend, a family member, and an illiterate citizen. The response
scale ranged from (1) for a total inability to convince the citizen, to (4) for a confident
personal ability to convince the citizen. The question was intentionally designed to
capture factors relating to personal efficacy, and not to external factors constraining
agents’ activities, such as the mayor forbidding agents to visit his favored constituencies.
Table 4 lists the average personal efficacy score agents reported for each type of citizen.
The results indicate that agents felt the least efficacious when interacting with partisans.70
70 During actual visits, agents can plausibly identify partisanship because residents publicly
invoke their party ties (see Table 1).
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Table 4. Mean Collector Efficacy Score by Citizen Type
Partisan Wealthy
owner
Relation Friend Illiterate
Mean (s.d) 3.19 (0.89) 3.39 (0.72) 3.62 (0.56) 3.58 (0.56) 3.62 (0.49)
This suggests that there is something particular about partisan ties that make it
difficult for tax agents to do their jobs, and that the lower partisan score is not simply
reflecting differences in wealth. Lower efficacy scores for partisans also fits with the
evidence found in Table 3 an astonishing 40 percent of agents reported that residents
openly call politicians in front of them to contest tax obligations. This is a clear instance
of citizens taking the initiative to make demands on their politicians for tax exemptions.
Finally, I asked collectors to name the most and least difficult areas in which they
collect. 95 percent of collectors were able to distinguish between difficult and easy areas,
confirming that collectors themselves perceive differences among citizens and that these
differences affect their work. Taken together, the pilot survey broadly indicated that state-
citizen interactions vary across space (difficult versus easy neighborhoods) and across
citizen types (partisans versus non-partisans). It also indicates that partisanship with the
mayor is significantly associated with resistant behavior towards tax collectors. The
results lead me to make the following hypothesis, which I will test in the next chapter: we
will observe more frequent and more severe instances of citizen resistance in areas with
strong partisan ties to incumbents because inhabitants of those areas are best positioned
to demand and receive tax exemptions on the basis of their vote.
Conclusion
The evidence presented in this chapter squarely contradicts my findings in the
previous chapter. There, I found a positive bump in pro-tax attitudes for those informed
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that their districts voted in higher-than-average rates for the mayor. Here, I find that
politicians and bureaucrats report the greatest difficulties in convincing incumbent
partisans to pay taxes. The discrepancy between citizens’ stated tax attitudes and their
observed tax behavior71 raises a new question: why don’t the pro-tax gains among
incumbent supporters translate to more compliant behavior when it comes to actual tax
payment?
The answer I propose is rooted in clientelist logic. In the same way that clientelist
beneficiaries are more likely to find promises to redistribute the gains from tax towards
them more credible, they are also more likely to find assurances of lax enforcement for
nonpayment more credible. This encourages clients to resist taxes with less fear of
punishment. In the next chapter, I show how citizens deploy this logic in their
interactions with tax collectors.
71 This discrepancy is not unique to my study. It is a well-documented trend across many tax
compliance studies that strong correlations in attitudinal measures captured in surveys do not
translate to field experiments on tax behavior (more discussion in Chapter 5).
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Chapter 5: Sites of Resistance
The surveys and testimony of politicians and bureaucrats in Chapter 4 suggest
widespread resistance to taxes, particularly so among incumbent supporters. Municipal
residents use a variety of means at their disposal to refuse payment, from calling
politicians to whom they have close ties to making direct requests during constituency
visits. If this is indeed the case, then we should see the greatest rates of resistance among
clientelist beneficiaries who are empowered to openly flout tax laws.
In this chapter, I test another observable implication of my theory: that citizens
will resist taxation on the basis of their client status. This prediction runs counter to my
conclusions in Chapter 4, where I found a positive effect of clientship on willingness to
support taxes. Why would the citizens most likely to believe they will benefit from and
express greater support for taxation also exhibit the highest rates of resistance to taxes?
Such a trend raises a common discrepancy between individuals’ stated attitudes and their
observed behavior (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1977). It also raises the question of whether the
increased support for taxation I observed among likely clients in Chapter 4 will translate
to similar gains in pro-tax behavior.
One reason for the discrepancy may be that government action has a mediating
effect between citizens’ personal attitudes and their behavior. Citizens’ attitudes are not
formed in isolation, and neither are their decisions about how to engage with the state.
Rather than looking at citizens’ attitudes in isolation as I have done so far, I now turn to
citizens’ behavioral responses to state efforts to tax them. The government action I focus
on is the use of clientelist practices towards voters; I want to measure how the
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employment of these practices mediates the behavior of potential clients, and to what
extent it might distort their stated attitudes towards taxes.
I am thus concerned with acts of defiance to governmental authority: when will
citizens oppose taxation, and how does clientelism affect who is likely to do so? There is
little available data to count refusals, given that city hall administrations do not keep
records of tax collectors’ interactions with citizens. As an alternative, I use Benin’s
Afrobarometer survey to get records of citizens’ self-reported refusals. Measuring their
reports across space, I find greater rates of refusal in incumbent-leaning areas, and among
partisans of the mayor in those areas.
I first review the literature linking tax attitudes to compliance under tax morale theories,
highlighting the discrepancies between survey and experimental results.
Review of tax morale literature
Studies of tax attitudes and tax behavior have largely been conducted separately,
which has resulted in discrepancies between attitudinal survey and experimental results.
This is especially true with the literature on tax morale, or an individual’s willingness to
pay tax (Torgler 2002). A guiding idea in tax morale theories is that individuals’ personal
attitudes towards taxes will affect their tax compliance.
Two prominent hypotheses spell out this mechanism. Under the intrinsic
motivation hypothesis, citizens might be motivated to pay taxes out of a sense of civic
duty, or simply because they believe it is the right or honest thing to do (Andreoni et al
1998). Under a social norm hypothesis, the extent to which individuals adopt prevalent
pro-tax norms can encourage compliance when individuals anticipate negative
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reputational costs from non-payment, or when they anticipate that their peers are
generally compliant (Alm et al 1999).
While survey studies have shown some positive evidence confirming these two
hypotheses, they have not been replicated in experiments that sought to change taxpayer
behavior. Survey studies testing the intrinsic motivation hypothesis have found that the
belief that not paying taxes is wrong is positively correlated with self-reported tax
compliance measures (Scholz and Pinney 1995; Torgler et al 2008; Wenzel 2005; Ali et
al 2013). However, when Blumenthal et al (2001) tested the effect of normative appeals
on tax compliance in Wisconsin, they found that the appeals, sent via letters mailed to
taxpayers, had no effect on tax payment.
Likewise, survey and behavioral measures differed for tests of the social norms
hypothesis. Although attitudinal surveys like Bobek et al (2007) find positive correlations
between pro-tax social norms and tax compliance, several field experiments that
highlighted the extent to which others pay found no significant treatment effects on tax
compliance (Blumenthal, Christian, and Slemrod 2001; Fellner, Sausgruber, and Traxler
2013; Del Carpio 2014, Castro and Scartascini 2013).
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Despite the potential flaws and limitations of existing experimental designs,72 the
failure to replicate the results from attitudinal studies suggests that citizens’ personal
attitudes or stated willingness to pay are not enough on their own to explain compliance.
In addition to experimental design problems, the tax morale hypothesis does not
sufficiently address the case of clients in Benin. As I show in Chapter 4, these residents
express the greatest willingness to pay—and thus have higher levels of tax morale—yet
are among the worst offenders according to tax collector testimony.
There is much stronger evidence that responses to government shape both
personal attitudes and compliance behavior (Alm et al 1999). Recent work by Bodea and
Lebas (2015) in Nigeria suggests that social norms are actually formed in response to
state action: as confirmation of the fiscal exchange hypothesis, they find more pro-tax
norms in areas where the state provides more public services, and less in areas where
communities rely on self-help provision of goods. Another field experiment in Mexico
found that municipal residents payed more property taxes following the completion of a
street pavement project (Gonzalez-Navarro and Quintana-Domeque, 2016). Further
survey evidence comes from Levi et al (2009) and Ali et al. (2014), who find consistent
positive correlations between receipt of public goods and pro-tax attitudes.
72 The null effects should be viewed with caution, as we cannot rule out that information about others’
behavior simply was not enough to change respondents’ priors (Mascagni 2018). The treatments in these
experiments may simply have been too weak to move pre-existing attitudes.
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Another way government action can shape compliance behavior is through
deterrence, or the coercive capacity of the state to credibly pursue and punish or coerce
non-compliers (Allingham and Sandmo 1972). The strongest and most consistent
experimental evidence shows that when citizens believe they will be monitored and
censured by the state, i.e. incur a cost for nonpayment, they increase their compliance73
(Kleven 2011, Fellner 2013, Castro and Scartascini 2013, Pomeranz 2015).
Theory and testable implications
My theory adds a third government action to this list—the clientelist practices of
political leaders. I argue that these practices shape citizens’ perceptions of both the fiscal
exchange relationship (Chapter 4) and the government’s capacity for deterrence (this
chapter). Deterrence is largely reduced when clientelist obligations weaken the
bargaining power of state actors, including captured tax collectors, such that they are
disincentivized to enforce tax laws. These choices then lead to lower costs of punishment
for nonpayment for clients.
The resulting outcome is that even when citizens understand the benefits of
taxation, find it credible that they will benefit, and express pro-tax civic norms, we still
observe noncompliance. Clientelist logic in effect “crowds out” other considerations that
would make citizens more likely to pay in its absence. This is even more likely to be the
case when pro-tax attitudes are not deeply held, as in Benin.
73 This claim comes with a caveat that the studies listed have mainly been in developed or high-
middle-income countries like Sweden, the U.S, and Argentina. They have not been conducted in
low-income countries, where the likelihood of audits and the monitoring capacity of governments
are not likely to be credible enough to act as a deterrent.
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I test my theory by looking at two factors that could affect citizens’ ability to
resist taxes. The first test is a function of their personal partisanship: the belief that as a
supporter of the incumbent, they are personally eligible for lax enforcement of tax laws.
The second test is a function of their local context: regardless of personal partisanship, it
is simply easier (for both residents and tax personnel) to identify and verify incumbent
strongholds in higher ruling vote share districts.
In terms of observable implications, we should expect to see greater rates of tax
resistance either among incumbent partisans, in incumbent-supporting areas, or both.
H1. If personal partisanship is more important, then we should expect to see party
identification be a significant predictor of tax refusals regardless of context.
H2. If local context is more important, then we should see partisans and non-
partisans behave similarly in high vote share areas, where community client status
is more visible.
A third possibility is that the local context conditions the behavior of partisans. This
could happen if partisans feel ‘safer’ to openly refuse taxes in incumbent stronghold
districts. Previous findings from Chapter 3 support this hypothesis, as I found that the
strongest effects of the relative vote information treatment were in areas with higher
neighborhood vote shares for the mayor. It is precisely in these areas that the mayor and
his party could credibly enjoy a monopoly over the allocation of preferential access to
excludable goods.
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H3. If local context conditions the behavior of partisans, then there should be an
interaction effect between partisanship and ruling party vote shares, such that
partisans are more likely to report refusals in ruling party strongholds.
Data and Research Design
Afrobarometer surveys are a reliable source of public opinion data on nationally
representative samples of African citizens. The 2011 Round 5 survey included a special
section on taxation issues, along with a standard question on tax refusals. I use the Benin
survey data to measure the rates at which respondents reported having refused to pay a
tax in the past year. Recognizing the limitations of self-reported measures, which are
unreliable especially with regards to sensitive questions about tax payments, I interpret
the behavior as an admission of a refusal to pay taxes rather than an actual refusal. This
measure is even more informative once we consider that 68 percent of survey
respondents perceived the survey sponsor as a government actor; as such, the admission
mimics an act of defiance of governmental authority.
The survey is well timed, occurring three years after Benin’s 2008 municipal
elections. I exploit the same subnational variation in the political dominance of mayors
across the country's municipalities as in Chapter 4. Of Benin’s 77 municipalities and 546
districts, 34 municipalities and 125 districts are represented in the Afrobarometer survey.
The ruling party for each municipality was the party that received the greatest share of
municipal votes (this was almost always equal to the mayor's political party affiliation). I
then calculated the 2008 district vote share for its respective ruling party for all 125
districts as my first indicator of political support, measured at the aggregate level. The
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higher the district vote share for the ruling party, the stronger the district’s partisan
affiliation.
My second measure of political support is an individual partisan identification
with a political party. I used the survey question which asks respondents if they feel close
to any political party. Table 2 shows the number of municipalities each ruling political
party acquired in the 2008 local elections. Partisans of the incumbent were identified as
those whose party identification matched that of the ruling party. Several local parties
who won elections were not included as options in the Afrobarometer. When the local
ruling party was a member of Benin's national opposition alliance, Union fait la Nation
(UN), I coded it as such to increase the number of party ID matches. UN alliance
members are designated with an asterisk in Table 2.
I also consider pre-existing expectations for favoritism more broadly. For this
item I use the Afrobarometer question which asks respondents which statement they most
agree with: elected leaders should represent everyone, or should prioritize their home
community. Those who agreed with the second statement were labeled as having
favoritism expectations using a binary indicator. 74 As the survey did not ask any
questions about expectations for tax exemptions specifically, I use this question as the
closest alternative to test whether individuals with generalized favoritism expectations are
more likely to report tax refusals.
74 Question: Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Statement 1: Once in office, elected leaders are obliged to help their home community or group first. Statement 2: Since elected leaders
should represent everyone, they should not do anything that favors their own group over others."
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My dependent variable is the set of respondents who report a refusal to pay taxes
or fees to the government in the past year.75 While the question does not specify local
taxes, 74 percent of respondents who reported having to pay taxes cited municipal taxes
such as property taxes, vendor, and license fees.
To create the spatial measure of political support, I grouped survey respondents
into their respective districts within their respective municipalities, then assigned each
respondent his or her district vote share for the ruling party. This indicator allows me to
compare the same attitudes and behaviors among respondents who reside in incumbent
strongholds versus those who do not. To create the individual measure of political
support, I indicated whether there was a match between the respondent's partisan
identification and the ruling party. This indicator allows me to compare attitudes towards
the civic obligation to pay taxes and rates of tax resistance between those who identify
with the municipal ruling party and those who do not. Table 1 contains a list of
descriptive statistics of relevant explanatory variables used in the analysis.
75 Question: Here is a list of actions that people sometimes take as citizens. Please tell me whether you,
personally, have done any of these things during the past year. Refused to pay a tax or fee to government?" Of the total sample, 10 percent of respondents reported a refusal. Given anecdotal evidence of widespread tax resistance from local state actors, this is likely to be an underestimate of actual tax refusal rates.
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Table 5.1: District-level Descriptive Statistics
Statistic N Mean St. Dev Min Pct(25) Pct(75) Max
Incumbent
partisans
133 0.211 0.409 0 0 0 1
Tax refusals 133 0.093 0.292 0 0 0 1
Ruling
district vote
share
133 0.521 0.174 0.021 0.439 0.624 1
District EF 133 0.768 0.240 0.188 0.570 1 1
Electricity 133 0.511 0.502 0 0 1 1
Paved roads 133 0.406 0.493 0 0 1 1
I also included several variables to test alternative hypotheses. I estimated the district
ethnic fractionalization index from survey respondents' ethnic identification to test for the
hypothesis that ethnically homogeneous areas are more tax compliant (Lieberman 2003).
I also included measures of satisfaction with basic government services, trust in elected
officials and tax officials, and a personal belief in the right of government to tax as
additional variables to test fiscal exchange and intrinsic motivation hypotheses.
The measures outlined above allow me to test the following hypotheses, reviewed below.
H1: Self-identified partisans of the ruling party will be more likely to report tax
refusals.
H2: Residents of high ruling party vote share districts will be more likely to
report tax refusals.
H3: Partisans in high ruling party vote share districts will be more likely to report
tax refusals.
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I test the hypotheses using logistic regressions with an indicator for a tax refusal as my
dependent variable. I measure how much the partisan affiliation variables increase the
likelihood of observing a tax refusal compared to alternative explanations. The estimated
model is below, where i refers to a respondent in district d and municipality m, P is a
vector of other personal characteristics and attitudes of the respondent, D is a vector of
district-level characteristics, and δ denotes municipal fixed effects.
refusalidm = pididm + dvotesharedm + pididm ∗ dvotesharedm + Pidm + Ddm + δ + ϵidm
Afrobarometer Results
Table 2 contains the results of four logistic regressions with a reported tax refusal
as the dependent variable and coefficients as odds ratios. The first regression model in
Table 2 contains only the spatial political support measure (ruling party district vote
share) and the individual political support measure (personal identification with the ruling
party). The second model includes control variables. The third model includes variable
capturing alternative explanations for tax compliance, and an interaction term between
district-level and individual support to test H3. The final model excludes the interaction
term. Across all four columns, there is support for the hypothesis that residents of
incumbent strongholds will be more likely to resist taxes. A one-percent increase in the
respondent’s district vote share for the mayor’s party doubles the odds of a reported tax
refusal. Figure 1, below, presents a visual representation of the marginal effect
coefficients instead of odds ratios.
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The negative association between party identification and tax resistance, however,
is the opposite of my predictions in H1. Those who personally identify with the mayor's
political party are significantly less likely to report a tax refusal across all four models in
Table 5.2. This is potentially good news, as it suggests that ruling party supporters are on
average less likely to resist taxes.
An important caveat is that this finding does not capture the individual and private
transfers that occur between patrons and clients, as outlined in Chapter 4 and in works by
Lindberg (2010) and Nichter and Peress (2017) among others. One reason partisans of the
mayor’s party may report less frequent refusals may be that they can successfully
negotiate a reduced tax bill or may more easily have their tax bill nullified. While there is
ample qualitative evidence that these negotiations occur in Chapter 4, the Afrobarometer
survey questions do not allow me to capture this potential confounding factor.
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Table 5.2: Logistic Regression Results
Dependent variable: Refusal
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Ruling district vote share 2.117** 2.173** 1.761** 2.340***
(0.963) (0.960) (0.752) (0.718)
PID match -0.624* -0.557 -3.117*** -0.845***
(0.354) (0.365) (0.946) (0.298)
EF District -1.747*** -1.680***
(0.502) (0.514)
Expect favor 0.694** 0.713**
(0.318) (0.312)
Trust local officials 0.090 0.107
(0.140) (0.138)
Gov right to tax -0.348*** -0.332***
(0.081) (0.081)
Satisf roads -0.355** -0.363**
(0.169) (0.174)
Hard avoid tax -0.150 -0.133
(0.169) (0.168)
District vote share * PID Match 3.530***
(1.237)
Controls? N Y Y Y
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Additional notes: Coefficients are odds ratios. All models include municipal fixed
effects. Included controls are sex, education, age, urban/rural, poverty, and neighborhood
poverty measures
Figure 5.1
Figure 5.2
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For a more intuitive interpretation, Figure 5.2 displays the change in district vote share
on the x-axis associated with the change in the predicted probability of refusal on the y-
axis76. Going from a district with a 20 percent vote share to one of 80 percent for example
raises the probability of refusal from about 4 percentage points to 14 percentage points, a
10-point difference. This result, a confirmation of H2, is substantive considering that 10
percent of respondents openly admitted a refusal (indicated by the horizontal line at the
mean). Figure 2 shows that respondents in low ruling party vote share areas significantly
underreport tax refusals relative to the mean, while those in higher vote share areas
overreport.
In Model 3, I tested the hypothesis that the role of party ID is conditional on
context—that is, partisans may behave more boldly in their refusals when in a ‘safe’
district with broad incumbent support. Anecdotal accounts state that these same partisans
are frequent offenders, especially in ruling party strongholds. To test for this particular
scenario, I checked whether the relationship between incumbent party ID and tax
resistance could be conditional on local context. The interaction term coefficient in
Model 3 suggests this is the case: ruling party identifiers in higher vote share districts are
more likely to report a tax refusal, but significantly less likely overall. This result is in
line with my findings in previous chapters. In Chapter 4, I also found evidence that
individuals take community context into account when forming expectations, such that
even slight relative differences in district vote shares are informative to them. The same
appears to be true here, as incumbent partisans behave differently in areas where they are
76 Predicted probabilities are calculated with other variables held at their observed values.
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presumably more confident that their party controls. In Chapter 4, I found that tax
collectors are sensitive about the location of political strongholds and report difficulty
collecting in those areas, specifically from incumbent supporters. This finding is also
further supported by the present results, which add evidence in support of H3.
Although it was significant at the 0.10 level, the large error term for the
interaction coefficient renders the evidence for H3 only weakly suggestive. In Figures
5.3 and 5.4 I compared the marginal effects of ruling party vote share among incumbent
partisans (on the left) and non-incumbent partisans (on the right). An observable
implication in support of H3 would be to see significant differences in the behavior of
partisans and non-partisans of the ruling party in incumbent strongholds. Incumbent
partisans were a much smaller group (about 20 percent of the sample), which contributed
to the large confidence intervals. There were less observations in the higher end (70
percent+ district vote share) to generate conclusive results. Nonetheless, the rest of
Figure 5.3 shows a marked difference in tax compliance behavior among partisans in
districts where their party is not well represented compared to districts where their party
is in the majority. They are much less likely to report a tax refusal in districts that are
unpopular with the incumbent. This may also be what is in part driving the negative
relationship between party ID and tax resistance. However, in incumbent-majority
districts, they are much more likely to refuse to pay taxes. This trend offers supportive
evidence of my theory, by suggesting that ruling party identifiers refuse to pay in areas
where they can best show their past political support, and where politicians can best
target their distribution of tax exemptions. Figure 5.4 confirms that the same trend holds
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for non-partisans, but the increase in the marginal effect of ruling party district vote share
(that is, of local political context) on tax refusals is not as pronounced for this group.
My theory is further supported by comparing to the behavior of non-incumbent
partisans. We still see an increase in refusal rates as district vote shares also increase,
indicating that everyone living in high-vote areas seeks to benefit from the district’s party
affiliation. That is, we do not see a positive association between incumbent partisanship
Figure 5.3
Figure 5.4
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and ruling party vote shares simply because there are more partisans in incumbent
strongholds. The rise is not as steep at the upper end of the district vote share scale,
indicating that they reported refusals at lower rates than their incumbent partisan
counterparts. Taken together, the two graphs suggest a story of opportunity: while ruling
partisans may refrain from admitting refusals in areas where their party is less popular,
they take advantage of more favorable conditions in high incumbent vote districts to
openly express their resistance. This type of decision-making conditional on the
community’s political context is the same as that observed in Chapter 4, where
expectations for benefits increase in the strength of ruling party dominance.
The favoritism expectations hypothesis also seems to be supported. Across all
four models, having expectations for targeted favoritism significantly increases the
likelihood that a respondent will report a tax refusal. While this does not denote a causal
relationship between favoritism and tax resistance, I present more experimental evidence
in the next section that further supports the idea that voting for a politician increases
expectations to receive favorable treatment from them.
Two alternative hypotheses were also confirmed. Respondents who believed that
the government has the right to tax, a four-point indicator for state legitimacy, were
significantly less likely to report a refusal, as predicted by the legitimacy hypothesis.
Finally, there is support for the role of ethnicity: a higher district ethnic fractionalization
score (and thus higher district ethnic homogeneity) is associated with a decreased
likelihood of reporting a tax refusal.77 Meanwhile enforcement, measured as the
77 This result should be taken with the caveat that the EF measure is very coarse, as the data
comes from Afrobarometer district samples of 8-16 respondents who reported their ethnicities.
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respondent's perception that avoiding taxes is difficult; public service delivery, measured
as satisfaction with local roads and markets; and perceptions of corruption of tax officials
and local elected officials, were all insignificant in predicting tax refusals. Accounting for
all of these other variables does not take away the significance of the political variables.
Figure 5.5: the proportion of district respondents eligible to pay tax versus the district’s
corresponding vote share for the ruling party.
As a last robustness check, I verify that the positive relationship I find between
district vote share for the mayor’s party and admissions of tax refusals is not just a
spurious correlation due to the possibility that there are simply more eligible taxpayers in
high incumbent support areas. This could be the case for example if incumbent
strongholds tend to be in centers of economic and commercial activity or districts that are
more developed. I use the Afrobarometer question asking whether the respondent is
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responsible for paying municipal fees or property taxes.78 On average, 70 percent of
respondents answered yes to at least one of the questions. In Figure 5.5, I show that the
proportion of district respondents eligible to pay local fees or property taxes and the
district’s corresponding ruling party vote share are not correlated.
Experimental Design
While offering consistent evidence of an association between communal voting
and tax refusals, the evidence on its own cannot tell us the rationale behind refusal
decisions, and whether they were driven specifically by expectations for lax punishment
as a clientelist reward. I therefore set out to test my theoretical assumptions in two steps.
First, to determine whether citizens directly associate ruling party affiliation with
expectations for less tax enforcement; second, to determine whether they consider party
affiliation when deciding how to respond to tax agents.
I supplement the previous section’s findings with the results of a vignette
experiment included in the same survey experiment of 1,152 respondents introduced in
Chapter 4. The experimental design tries to isolate the effect of personal and communal
vote choice so that I can attribute any differences in expectations for punishment directly
to those variables with less interference from competing explanations.
78 The exact wording of the question is Q73: ‘Regardless of whether you are able to pay
them, are you required to pay each of the following, or haven’t you been able to find out about
this:’ The options selected were Q73B for ‘license fees to local government, for example, for a
bicycle, cart, business, or market stall’ and Q73C for ‘property taxes or fees.’
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The vignette presents respondents with a hypothetical resident named Robert in a
neighboring municipality who finds his tax bill too high and would like to complain to
local authorities.79 The control group received no other information about the resident;
the first treatment group was told that the resident personally voted for the mayor; and the
second treatment group was told that the citizen lived in a stronghold of the mayor's
party. The two treatment arms allowed me to compare the relative importance of personal
and communal votes.
Expectations for enforcement
The respondent was asked a series of questions, summarized in Table 5.4, about
the taxpayer and the likelihood of punishment for non-payment. The questions were on a
5-point Likert scale, but the results presented have been condensed to binary indicators. I
created three indicators to understand the underlying motivations citizens might have to
refuse tax payments.
First, to measure general anti-tax sentiment, I asked respondents if they agreed
with Robert’s complaints; about half of the control sample reported that they did.
Second, I wanted to measure the extent to which citizens might penalize an
elected official for enforcing tax payments. Anticipation of electoral sanctions was a
frequent concern cited by politicians in qualitative interviews, so I sought to measure how
79 Vignette control text: “Robert owns a family home in the same neighborhood he has lived in
for years. [treatment text here] Like many Beninese, when he is unhappy with his local
governance he often calls in to morning radio shows. This time, he feels the tax bill he received
from the city hall is high.” Treatment 1: “He supports the mayor and voted for him as district
councilor in the last elections.” Treatment 2: “His neighborhood heavily supported the mayor and
his party in the last elections.”
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much prioritizing taxes would affect a politician’s approval rating. To do this, I
introduced respondents to the mayor of Robert’s municipality, who has decided to
enforce tax laws in his city.80 When asked how much they approved of the mayor’s
application of the law in this instance, response rates were very low—only a quarter of
the control group said they approved.
Third, my next measure sought to capture the extent to which citizens expect tax
laws to be enforced in the first place. When asked about the likelihood that tax authorities
would punish Robert (incurring fines, taking away property, etc.) if he refused to pay,
almost all control respondents answered affirmatively (89%).
My expectations for these outcome variables were that priming respondents to
think about the taxpayer’s personal and communal party affiliation would 1) increase
anti-tax sentiment, 2) decrease mayoral approval, and 3) decrease expectations for
punishment.
I then compared how responses to these questions differed in the two treatment
groups to see whether my hypotheses held. I did not find any significant differences for
the first two questions, as the treatment groups expressed similar levels of solidarity with
the taxpayer and low rates of mayor approval. Despite this general consensus, the
treatment groups had lower expectations of punishment for nonpayment, but this was
only significant in the personal vote treatment group. This finding is consistent with my
theoretical expectations that supporters of incumbents expect lax enforcement if they
80 Vignette text: “The mayor of Robert's commune has decided to enforce the law when it comes
to paying taxes. He wants everyone to pay, including people like Robert. Do you approve of the
mayor's application of the law?”
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were to resist paying taxes. It also suggests that, in forming expectations about being
personally punished for nonpayment, respondents take into account their personal vote
for incumbents more so than their community’s vote.
Table 5.4: Treatment Effects on Attitudes
Control T1-Personal T2-Neighborhood
Agree with Robert 0.53 0.51 0.56
Mayor approval 0.24 0.26 0.27
Robert punished 0.89 0.82** 0.86
Note: Proportions of respondents who selected each option are shown.
A * indicates a statistical difference from the baseline control group (*=0.1, **=0.05).
Table 5.5: Preferred Taxpayer Action
Pay Negotiate Refuse/call
Control 0.29 0.64 0.07
T1: Personal Vote 0.34 0.57* 0.09
T2: Neighborhood
vote
0.33 0.56** 0.11**
Note: Proportions of respondents who selected each option are shown.
A * indicates a statistical difference from the baseline control group (*=0.1, **=0.05).
Consequences for tax behavior
My second objective was to explore the links between partisan considerations and
the decision to refuse to pay taxes. I asked respondents the best course of action Robert,
the hypothetical taxpayer, should take. The choices, outlined in Table 5.5, were designed
to mirror tax collectors’ descriptive accounts of citizen actions: pay the amount owed,
negotiate with the tax agent (presumably for a lesser charge), refuse to pay, or call an
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elected official. Across all treatment conditions, the most popular choice was to negotiate
with the tax collector, with about 60 percent choosing this option. The next preferred
action was to pay the amount owed, about a third of the sample. Given the option to
negotiate, the least popular choices were refusals, at about 10 percent. These trends
largely mirror what we observed from Afrobarometer data, where on average 10 percent
of the nationally representative sample reported a refusal in the past year.
A comparison of the control and treatment estimates offers a closer look at how
personal and neighborhood vote considerations altered respondents’ choices. When
primed to think of the taxpayer as a personal supporter of the mayor, the results were
mixed. Significantly fewer respondents chose to negotiate, but they seemed to be evenly
split between paying the original amount owed and refusing, producing no treatment
effects. When primed to think of the taxpayer as a resident of a mayor stronghold, we see
the same significant reductions in negotiation rates, this time accompanied by a
significant increase in refusals. I interpret this to mean that more respondents would opt
to refuse taxes if they lived in a mayor stronghold. This is in line with the Afrobarometer
analysis, where I found higher refusal rates in districts with higher vote shares for the
mayor’s ruling party.
Taking the two parts of the analysis together, it seems that personal party support
and communal vote status each play a role in respondents’ decision-making. Respondents
took the taxpayer’s personal support for the mayor into account when estimating the
chances that he would personally face consequences for nonpayment. They took the
taxpayer’s immediate local context, his neighborhood’s pro-incumbent status, into
account when deciding whether or not to refuse to pay taxes in the first place. That these
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findings complement the observational results of the Afrobarometer survey adds further
confidence to support my hypotheses
Discussion
The objective of this chapter was to show the implications of clientelist logic for
tax behavior. Absent individual-level data on both tax payments and attitudes, I use the
willingness to openly admit a refusal as a behavioral measure. I find consistent
relationship between living in an area where one can visibly show support for the
incumbent mayor and his party, and admissions of past refusals. Controlling for a
perceived government-sponsored survey enumerator, I find that respondents who live in
higher mayor vote share districts are more likely to report a tax refusal in the past year,
controlling for district wealth, public services, and ethnicity. While partisans of the ruling
party are on average less likely to report a tax refusal, they are more likely to do so in
districts with higher mayor vote shares.
I find evidence that mayor partisans do indeed behave differently than their
counterparts as they may be more emboldened to admit refusals. These findings were
subsequently supported with experimental evidence that the mechanisms I propose are at
play. The results indicate that the very people who would be expected to be most
compliant have the greatest opportunities and incentive to resist because of clientelist
logic.
Theoretical Implications
These results contradict expectations that tax compliance would be higher in areas
where leaders enjoy greater political legitimacy (Levi et al., 2009), but are in line with
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my theoretical predictions that likely clientelist beneficiaries expect and demand tax
exemptions. Tax morale theories predicts high willingness to pay translates to more pro-
tax behavior. While I find confirming evidence more broadly, I find this is not the case
for a significant subset: clientelist beneficiaries in incumbent-supporting areas.
The findings make both empirical and theoretical contributions. Empirically, I
offer a mix of qualitative, observational, and experimental methods to arrive at similar
conclusions, building confidence in my findings. I incorporate the perspectives of both
citizens and state actors to look at the interactions between the two, as opposed to a
purely citizen or purely elite-driven explanation.
I find that despite being negligibly happier with their public services, residents of
districts with high incumbent support are more likely to report refusals. What seems to be
driving non-compliant behavior in this instance is not only dissatisfaction with services,
which is widespread, but also the expectation to not be punished for refusals as a
clientelist benefit of voting for the mayor.
My findings suggest that expectations to have demands fulfilled persist long after
elections, and that citizens apply them to a broad range of issues and policies. In the case
of taxation, such demands have substantive implications for governance and public goods
provision, as government leaders are unable to enforce taxes for those who voted for
them. It therefore gives rise to a “perverse accountability” (Stokes, 2005) of a different
kind: citizens hold politicians accountable for lax enforcement of tax regulations. Such
practices render it difficult for leaders of developing states already facing capacity
constraints to convince their citizens to pay taxes.
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Chapter 6: Conclusion
The motivating question for my dissertation was to understand to what extent clientelism
and citizen tax resistance are connected. To establish such a connection would mean that
clients can demand more than just personal goods; their expectations persist and extend
to programmatic redistributive policies such as taxation. The result is a marked reduction
in state capacity to enforce taxes among clients and non-clients alike.
Summary of findings
I developed my argument over a series of steps meant to defend each of my underlying
assumptions about the strategic logic of both clients and political elites.
Ch 3: Client strategy
I first show that client status is salient and relevant to forming expectations about
access to publicly funded goods. In a survey experiment, I find that those who were
informed that they lived in districts higher than average vote shares for the ruling party
increased their expectations that their district would benefit from taxation. Those who
learned that their district was lower than average reduced their expectations.
The information treatment also induced shifts in the proportion of public revenue
respondents thought should come from taxing citizens, with those in the positive
treatment group shifting upwards, and those in the negative treatment group shifting
downwards. While not significant on their own, the shifts produced a significant
difference between above- and below-average vote share areas. This difference was only
relevant in cities where the mayor’s party was dominant, and thus credibly poised to
control the flow of resources across the city unilaterally. I thus provide evidence of
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citizens’ strategic reasoning and their ability to apply clientelist logic to wider,
programmatic redistributive policies.
Ch 4: Elite strategy
Next, I looked at how state actors respond to taxpayers’ clientelist expectations.
Through qualitative interviews, I introduced the perspective of politicians who keenly
calculate the electoral costs of enforcing taxes and decide to spare their supporters. These
constraints help to illustrate the limited bargaining power of political elites vis-à-vis
citizens, which creates the conditions for ruling party supporters to resist taxes.
Politicians exert further pressure on tax collectors to follow through on lax
enforcement for supporters. Collectors report the greatest tax resistance from self-
proclaimed supporters of the mayor’s party. Their testimony highlights a discrepancy
between ruling party supporters’ self-interested motivation to state their support taxation
when they think they are likely to benefit, and their reticence to actually pay taxes when
they are obligated to do so.
Ch 5: Citizen tax behavior
In further support of political elite testimony, I find that tax refusals may be
motivated by context, as people expect less tax enforcement in incumbent strongholds.
Using Afrobarometer survey data, I find that rates of admissions of tax refusals are higher
in districts with higher ruling party vote shares. I propose that it is in these areas where
claims to belonging in the ruling party’s political coalition are most credible and
verifiable, and thus respondents feel freer to refuse or admit to having refused to pay
taxes. However, self-identified partisans of the ruling party (those who report feeling
close to that party) are less likely to report a refusal. This indicates that a personal affinity
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to the party in power may encourage greater tax morale, although these findings were not
conclusive.
Evidence beyond Benin
Parts of my argument are supported by existing research. Throughout this chapter,
I leverage scholarly work in other countries to trace the underlying elements of my theory
in order to illustrate its plausibility and broader applicability. I hope to show how my
theory unifies these disparate elements into a coherent framework developed from the
case of Benin.
In Argentina, Calvo and Murillo (2012) find that voters perceive that proximity to the
party mediates their eligibility to receive targeted goods. When they are part of denser
partisan networks, and thus more socially proximate, they have higher expectations to
benefit from redistribution. My findings lend further support to their theoretical emphasis
on the perceptions and beliefs of voters as central to determining the nature of party-voter
linkages as clientelist or programmatic.
In a multi-country Afrobarometer study, Bratton et al (2011)81 illustrate citizens’
perceived costs and benefits from associations to the ruling party. They find evidence that
respondents who planned to vote for the ruling party were also more likely to expect to
benefit directly from those in power, and more likely to suspect that the government was
sponsoring the survey. They surmise that voters are motivated both by positive
81 Bratton, M., Ravi, B. & Tse-Hsin, C. (2011). Voting intentions in Africa: Ethnic, economic, or partisan. Afrobarometer Working Paper 127.
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expectations from benefiting from incumbent parties (because they find their distributive
promises credible) and the fear of sanctioning or retribution to express support for the
ruling party.
In the U.S., Cullen et al (2018) find that in swing states, reported taxable income
rises in counties that become aligned with the party of the president. The increases are
from sources that are more easily evaded, which the authors verify by noting that
suspicious tax claims and audit rates also fall in those areas. Their findings are
particularly noteworthy because they suggest that the same relationship I find between
party affiliation and tax compliance can be present even in programmatic and established
democracies. Granted, the mechanisms are different: the greater tax compliance they
observe is likely due to a positive outlook on government rather than expectations for
targeted goods in a clientelist setting. Nonetheless, it shows that shared partisanship can
indeed mediate perceptions of political legitimacy that in turn influence how willing
people are to pay taxes.
Finally, in Uganda, Carlson (2015) makes the case that partisan affiliation can be
imbued with meaning for African voters, even in settings where politics are usually
centered around valence issues rather than ideological ones. She identifies partisanship in
Uganda as supporting President Musevini’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) party
to the point of using motivated reasoning that defies objective evaluation of the quality of
public services: NRM partisans consistently rated the quality of local public goods more
highly than non-partisans, even when these services were objectively worse. In my case, I
conceptualize partisanship in Benin as taking on a perception of client status (or non-
status) that is salient, widely applicable, and consistent.
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Scope conditions
My dissertation’s featured approach, a mixed-method single case study,
necessarily engenders some noticeable limitations. Despite within-country comparisons,
the data is limited to Benin, raising concerns about external validity.
To start addressing these concerns, I look at how Benin compares to other
countries in the Afrobarometer in terms of their tax attitudes. Figures A1-A6 show
Benin’s relative placement on a number of taxation dimensions. Its citizens score
disproportionately high on willingness to refuse taxes (Figure A1), second only to Togo.
However, the wish to avoid taxes is relatively prevalent across a number of countries.
Benin is only moderately high in terms of actual refusals (Figure A2), indicating that it is
far from the only country struggling with issues of tax resistance. Beninese citizens also
score exceptionally high in their beliefs that tax officials are corrupt, an important
competing explanation for high tax resistance. Among the other measures of tax attitudes,
it is fairly comparable to other countries in the Afrobarometer.
There are few scope conditions to my argument. The defining features of Benin
that helped to illustrate my theory were 1) locally identifiable parties and party brands, 2)
spatial variation in the relative strength of ruling parties, and 3) local discretionary
authority of elected officials under decentralization. These generalizable features
plausibly lend the study external validity, as my theory makes no demands about the type
of party system (one-, two-, or multi-party), nor the type of regime (democratic or
authoritarian leaning), so long as elections are held and the country is nominally
democratic.
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To understand how my theory might work in other contexts, I compare Benin to two
other well-studied African countries with differing features: Ghana and Tanzania. Ghana
is a large democracy with a competitive two-party system. Tanzania is a semi-
authoritarian regime with a one-party dominant system. Citizens of both countries also
express substantial tax refusal rates at 8 and 20 percent respectively (Figure A2).
Ghana
Ghana, as the quintessential institutionalized two-party system in West Africa,
provides a good counterexample to Benin. The country’s two main parties, the National
Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), have dominated
presidential and parliamentary elections since 1992 and have successfully alternated
power over these years. Ghana’s two-party system, coupled with first-past-the-post
electoral rules, have discouraged both smaller regional parties and independent
candidates (Daddieh and Bob-Milliar 2014)82.
The parties’ longevity help Ghana fulfill the first criterion: stable parties with
recognizable party brands whose strength varies across the country. Its urban local
governments (metropolitan assemblies) are governed by locally elected mayors and
councils. And as in Benin, these local governments are responsible for collecting tax
revenue and providing public services under the Local Government Act of 1993.83
82 Daddieh, C. K., & Bob-Milliar, G. M. (2014). Ghana: The African Exemplar of an
Institutionalized Two-Party System?. In Party systems and democracy in Africa (pp. 107-128).
Palgrave Macmillan, London. 83 http://www.clgf.org.uk/regions/clgf-west-africa/ghana/
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Having met the three criteria, how might my theory play out differently in a two-
party system? The designation of ruling and opposition party would be much clearer and
easier to make, for one. Given what we know about partisanship and polarization in two-
party systems like the U.S., it is plausible to think about how the winner vs losers
framework would be even more salient in a place like Ghana. That I find results even in
Benin’s more complex multi-party PR system suggests that stronger results might be
found in Ghana, where patronage is also documented as prevalent (Lindberg 2008, 2010).
Existing research in Ghana also suggests that the strategic logic of voters that I outline is
already in effect: Ichino and Nathan (2013) find that members of minority ethnic groups
vote with the local majority group to ensure that local public goods are sent to their
locality.
Another noticeable difference between Ghana and Benin is wealth. Ghana is a
richer country with a sizeable middle class. One might expect that the difference in class
dynamics could dilute the prevalence of clientelism. In fact, we find the opposite.
Lindbergh and Weghorst (2011) find strong evidence of its persistence, as does Nathan
(2017), who finds that clientelist tactics remain popular among parties because the middle
class simply exits the political arena rather than participate, leaving clientelist politics to
the poor.
Tanzania
Tanzania’s ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has been in power since
independence in 1964 and has remained in power with huge electoral margins. The
dominance of the CCM underwrites its strong party brand, as many Tanzanians associate
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the party with Julius Nyerere, the country’s first President and founding member of the
party. The salient cleavage in Tanzanian politics is ruling party versus opposition parties,
as the opposition is divided but often referred to as a single bloc. Although the CCM
enjoys dominance nationally, its degree political support varies across Tanzania, giving
way to strongholds of the two main opposition parties, CHADEMA and CUF (Hyden
1999).84 Finally, limited decentralization has devolved taxation to local governments85,
who have the authority to spend public revenue (Fjeldstad and Semboja 1999). Thus,
Tanzania satisfies the three baseline conditions.
Clientelism and patronage politics are present in Tanzania, as in Ghana and Benin
(Kelsall 2002)86. For example, Croke (2017)87 finds that as much of a third of residents in
Dar es Salaam report experience with vote buying.
He also found that respondents inflated their stated support for CCM in the
presence of party representatives, indicating that voters fear the consequences of being
labeled an opposition supporter. Weghorst (2011)88 similarly found significant
differences in response rates under direct questioning vs sensitive survey techniques: over
84 Hyden, G. (1999). Top-down democratization in Tanzania. Journal of Democracy, 10(4), 142-
155. 85 Venugopal, V., & Yilmaz, S. (2010). Decentralization in Tanzania: An assessment of local
government discretion and accountability. Public Administration and Development, 30(3), 215-
231. 86 Kelsall, Tim. “Shop Windows and Smoke Filled Rooms: Governance and the Re-Politicisation
of Tanzanian Politics.” Journal of Modern African Studies 40, no. 4 (2002): 597–619. 87 Croke, K. (2017). Tools of single party hegemony in Tanzania: evidence from surveys and
survey experiments. Democratization, 24(2), 189-208. 88 Weghorst, K. (2011). Political attitudes and response bias in semi-democratic regimes: A
survey experiment comparing the list experiment and randomized response in Tanzania. Working
article.
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twice as much support for the opposition’s use of violence against CCM, and responses
that were more critical of fair elections and discrimination by CCM.
Such evidence of the perceived costliness of not supporting the ruling party
supports the premise of my own argument: that taxpayers in Benin are less likely to
support taxation because they expect to be punished for not supporting the incumbent
with their past votes. In Tanzania, under a semi-authoritarian regime, the estimates of
costs and punishment are likely to be even higher, given the role that fear and negative
inducements play in curtailing the political behavior of citizens in authoritarian settings
(Young and Mares 2016)89.
Taxation in Ghana and Tanzania
Both Ghana and Tanzania have faced marked resistance to taxation: widespread
protests against value added tax in the 1990s in Ghana (Addison and Osei 2001), and
similar uprisings in Tanzania (Fjeldstad and Semboja 1999).
Tanzania is particularly a problem, as it has the highest resistance to taxes in the
Afrobarometer: it leads in the percentage of people who say they have refused to pay in
2011: over 20 percent (see Figure A2). Fjeldstad and Semboja (1999, p.16) recount some
of the same qualitative anecdotes we see in Benin: local councilors want to distance
themselves from taxes to be re-elected, and often obstruct tax collection in the process:
“Statements such as ‘don’t harass taxpayers’ were quoted from CCM-politicians (the
ruling party) who tried to moderate the tax collectors’ efforts to enforce taxes during
election years. On the other hand, politicians from the opposition parties approached
89 Mares, I., & Young, L. (2016). Buying, expropriating, and stealing votes. Annual Review of
Political Science, 19, 267-288.
162
taxpayers directly and advised them ‘not to pay taxes’, since taxes, according to their
view, were used to ‘finance the CCM-government’.” (p.16)
Compared to Ghana and Tanzania, Benin can be seen as somewhat of a middle case: it is
democratic but without an institutionalized two-party system like Ghana, and relatively
free elections unlike the imbalanced laying field of a hybrid one-party dominant regime
like Tanzania. Yet, we see the conditions for my theory in each of the settings, and its
potential to help explain tax resistance in each country.
Revisiting the principal-agent problem
In one of the central texts defining clientelism, Kitschelt & Wilkinson (2007)
think of clientelism as a principal-agent problem with clients as the principal and
politicians as their agents. As Hicken (2011) notes, this view contradicts most studies,
who place clients as the subordinates of politicians (p.292).
My research in Benin reinforces the client-as-principal view. Clientelist offers are viewed
as obligations to be upheld, rather than the means to change a person’s mind. Therefore,
voters punish those who don’t give but do not necessarily vote for those who do. That
decision is ultimately based on who they perceive to best control the flow of resources
and sanctions—that is, who is most credibly placed to reward their supporters and neglect
(or even punish) their non-supporters.
This last part highlights the central tension inherent in clientelist exchanges. If
voters are concerned about retaliation for their vote, then how can they truly be
empowered principals? Indeed, as Stokes (2005) reminds us, under the perverse
accountability of clientelism it is voters who are held accountable for their vote.
163
Citizen interviews reveal that voters are aware of this contradiction too. It is
perhaps what makes clientelism so palatable to them: it offers them a chance to exercise
power even as they are powerlessness to stop the corruption and mismanagement they
perceive among politicians. Thus, to fully understand clientelism’s persistence, we must
consider the incentives citizens face to continue to participate and uphold this form of
political linkage. A central theme of this dissertation was to illustrate these incentives at
work in a concrete case.
Open Questions: Exit, Voice, and Political Participation
I show the potential for clientelism to foster substantive political accountability
and heighten citizens’ sense of agency to make claims of their elected officials. Thus, the
relevant question is not whether clientelism in and of itself is “good” or “bad” for
political and economic development, but rather about the content of citizens’ clientelist
claims and the type of state engagement it encourages. This point is evident in the case of
the effect of clientelism on state taxation, which yields mixed results.
On one hand, positive reminders of client status can nominally boost support for
taxation among supporters. But these gains are likely erased by stronger incentives and
opportunities for this group to resist or evade taxes with less fear of punishment, which
results in contestation. This outcome is not necessarily bad, as it encourages clientelist
beneficiaries to exercise their voice options and bargain with the state over taxation. It
remains to be seen whether this contestation can be harnessed for good, that is, to demand
better performance rather than exemptions from civic obligations.
164
On the other hand, negative client status further reduces tax morale among non-
incumbent supporters, and perhaps encourages or facilitates quieter acts of
disengagement, which results in a significant portion of the citizenry exiting a contract
with the state entirely.
Such responses to government projection of power fall within Hirschman’s (1970) exit-
voice framework. When organizations perform poorly, consumers have the choice of
using their exit options by abandoning the organization, their voice options by airing their
grievances in some way, or some combination of both. I conceptualize stated acts of
resistance to state authority as an instance of a voice option: citizens use their voices to
not only refuse to pay, but to send a message to politicians that they are unhappy with its
operations.
Just as we saw divergence in attitudes towards taxation between incumbent
leaning and opposing constituencies, we also see divergence in resistance behaviors
across these two groups. We therefore see that those with negative client status may be
more inclined to exit quietly, by privately withholding their pavements and thereby
disengaging with the state. Meanwhile, those with positive client status are more
empowered to use their voice options to express their displeasure through acts of
defiance, or to demand exemptions and leniency.
What might be some of the ramifications of this divergence? Voice in and of itself
can be a powerful tool for change when used as a means of accountability for positive
change. Even if they are using it for the “wrong” reasons, they are still challenging state
authorities that they perceive to be poorly performing in terms of public service
provision. Thus, while clientelism might be detrimental taxation in the sense that it
165
discourages compliance, it may also have positive spillovers by encouraging a subset of
the population to exercise voice. What is left to address is the fact that these spillovers are
not experienced evenly, and how to change the basis on which these challenges are made.
166
Ch 6 Tables and Figures
Figure 5 Figure 6
Figure 3 Figure 4
Figure 1 Figure 2
167
Appendix: Qualitative Interviews
INTERVIEWS
2014 Broker Interviews (N=15)
Participants were contacted via snowball sampling based on contacts with the Institute for
Empirical Research in Political Economy (IERPE) in Benin. Each participant was meant
to be representative of the various forms of civil society groups in the country.
Grand Broker Interview 9/20: Joseph Gandaho
MP interview 9/21: Bony Sanary
Mini interview with Clement Litchegbe (former local broker), 9/26
Interview with Mayor of Zagnanado 9/29
Interview with Rufin Godjo of Ebert Foundation, 10/2
Interview with Father Andre Quenum, La Croix (10/7)
Interview with UN party organizer Mireille Marmou, (10/8)
Interview with union leader Simeon Dossou (10/9)
Zagnanado interviews (10/11-10/12): 5 interviews, 7 respondents including local brokers
and educators
2015 Bureaucrat Interviews (N=13)
Participants were contacted because of their role as either Secretary General or Director
of Fiscal Affairs in the municipalities of Benin’s Atlantique Region.
05/20/15
Marc Aitchedi, Chef Service Affaires Economiques et Financières, Allada
05/22/15
IDOHOU Obys Christian, Régisseur Principale des Recettes, Cotonou
05/22/15
SG de Cotonou, M. Fallade
05/28/15
Stéphanas Jean-Luc ABOKY
Chef Division de la Gestion des Equipements Marchands et des Gares Routières,
Abomey-Calavi
168
Stephanas Aboky, Chef division des équipements marchands, 7/21/2015
06/1/15
Raoul Glessougbe, SG Mairie d'Abomey-Calavi
06/1/15
Pierre Ayato, SG Mairie de So-Ava
SG Ze, 06/1/15
Honoré K. Azonve, Chef service du développement local et de la planification
Joseph D. Adjagbe, Chef du service des affaires financières
SG Toffo , 06/01/15
Landry Hinnou, SG de Ouidah, 7/23/2015
Godwin Adjovi, Régisseur des Recettes, Ouidah 7/23/2015
2016 Interviews
Politician Interviews, November-December 2016 (N = 7)
Participants were part of a convenience sample of politicians from the five cities included
in the survey experiment study.
CA Adjarra 2
CA Ouidah 2, 3, 4,
CA Porto-Novo (two interviews)
Porto-Novo council meeting
Other 2016 Interviews
8/8/2016
SGA, Adeye Fidel,
CHEF Division Promotion Economique des Affaires Financières, Joel Fadikpe
VISITS
The following is a partial account of visits to the local administrations of the five
surveyed sites. Each entry denotes either a formal meeting or an interview with members
from the indicated department.
169
COTONOU
PORTO-NOVO
DATE INSTITUTION SERVICE
11 avril 2016 Mairie de Porto-Novo Secrétariat Général
11, 14 avril 2016 Mairie de Porto-Novo Service RFU
Mairie de Porto-Novo Direction des services
techniques
Centre des impôts et des
petites
entreprises (CIPE) 1 (Porto-
Novo)
Service de l'assiette
Service du recouvrement
Direction départementale
des impôts (DDI)- Ouémé
Plateau
DATE INSTITUTION SERVICE
13 avril 2016 Mairie de Cotonou Secrétariat Général
13 avril 2016 Mairie de Cotonou Service des Affaires
Economiques
13 avril 2016 Mairie de Cotonou Régis Principale
05 mai 2016 Mairie de Cotonou Service de la fiscalité / RFU
Mairie de Cotonou Direction/Services
Techniques
13 avril, 05 mai 2016 Mairie de Cotonou Direction des services
économiques et financiers
(DSEF)/service du budget
26 juillet 2016 Mairie de Cotonou DSEF
26 juillet 2016 DDI – Atlantique/Littoral
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BOHICON
DATE INSTITUTION SERVICE
19 avril 2016 Mairie de Bohicon Secrétariat Général
19 avril 2016 Mairie de Bohicon Service Affaires
Economiques
28 juillet 2016 Mairie de Bohicon Service RFU
Mairie de Bohicon Service du développement
local et de la
planification/RFU
Direction départementale
des impôts (DDI) Zou-
Collines
Service de l'assiette
Service du recouvrement
Mairie de Bohicon Service des affaires
domaniales
CALAVI
DATE INSTITUTION SERVICE
9 mai 2016 Mairie de Calavi Secrétariat Général
29 mars Mairie de Calavi Service Affaires
Economiques
SEME-PODJI
DATE INSTITUTION SERVICE
11 avril Mairie de Seme-Podji Secrétariat Général
11 avril Mairie de Seme-Podji Service Affaires
Economiques
11 avril Mairie de Seme-Podji Service RFU
5 aout 2016 Mairie de Seme-Podji
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FOCUS GROUPS AND MEETINGS
Focus group held with the heads of tax departments of a dozen Southern municipalities,
29 March 2016
Field visit: training of property
tax appraisers, Porto-Novo, 14
April 2016
Field visit: Meeting of the Porto-
Novo local council to discuss tax
issues, 14 April 2016
Chapter 3 Appendix
Table 1: Examples of Local Public Goods Provision
Category Project Examples
Sanitation
Final construction of an undergrounddrainage tunnel
Installation of public water taps
Provision of fertilizer and wastetreatment materials
Infrastructure
Repair and maintenance of 120 km ofrural roads
Construction of market stalls and shopunits in the market
Distribution of 100 street lamps
Health
Ambulance for localhealth centers
Construction of a clinic
Schools
Four classrooms built in public primaryschools
Installation of latrinesin local public primary schools
Construction of an orphanage
Construction of new classrooms
Installation of latrines in primary schools
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Table 2: Summary Statistics
Statistic Mean St. Dev. Min Max
Age 38.248 13.166 18 99Sex 0.500 0.500 0 1Education 1.211 0.980 0 3Without Basic Needs 5.025 2.677 0 12Possessions 3.279 1.225 0 5Discuss Politics 0.860 0.716 0 2Years Lived in Municipality 21.296 17.658 0.000 99.000Tax Visit 0.371 0.483 0 1Gov Sponsor 0.242 0.428 0 1Voted 0.696 0.460 0 1Community Meeting Attend 0.290 0.454 0 1Preferred Tax (in CFA) 32.820 25.118 0 100
Table 3: Balance by District Type
Below-Average Above-Average Diff. p-val
Female 0.490 0.500 −0.010 0.647Prop. Secondary 0.240 0.360 −0.120 0Age 37.720 39.170 −1.450 0.061Basic Needs Index [0-12] 5.240 4.810 0.430 0.007Possessions Index [0-5] 3.130 3.440 −0.310 0Mayor Party vote share 0.440 0.610 −0.170 0Preferred Tax 32.110 33.650 −1.540 0.295
Table 4: Treatment Assignments
District Treatment Information No informationT1 96 96T2 140 140T3 64 64Negative Vote Total 300 300T4 108 108T5 48 48T6 120 120Positive Vote Total 276 276
Total 576 576
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Table 5: District Vote Margins
Municip. District Vote Margin Treat Party Vote Share
1 OUIDAH PAHOU −0.110 1 RDL 0.2802 OUIDAH OUIDAH 1 0.110 5 RDL 0.2803 OUIDAH OUIDAH 2 0.120 5 RDL 0.2804 OUIDAH OUIDAH 4 0.300 6 RDL 0.2805 COTONOU 2EME −0.140 1 RB 0.2906 COTONOU 3EME −0.150 1 RB 0.2907 COTONOU 10EME 0.180 6 RB 0.2908 COTONOU 11EME 0.180 6 RB 0.2909 ADJARRA ADJARRA 1 −0.090 2 PRD 0.66010 ADJARRA HONVIE −0.050 3 PRD 0.66011 ADJARRA ADJARRA 2 0.220 6 PRD 0.66012 ADJARRA MALANHOUI 0.060 4 PRD 0.66013 PORTO-NOVO 3EME 0.060 4 PRD 0.85014 PORTO-NOVO 5EME −0.070 2 PRD 0.85015 BOHICON LISSEZOUN −0.070 2 RB 0.55016 BOHICON OUASSAHO −0.110 2 RB 0.55017 BOHICON PASSAGON −0.030 3 RB 0.55018 BOHICON BOHICON 2 0.060 4 RB 0.550
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Table 6: Tax Preferences by District Voteshare
DV: Preferred Tax RateControl Group Treatment Group
OLS HLM OLS HLM
(1) (2) (3) (4)
District vote share 0.120∗∗ 0.148 0.151∗∗∗ 0.161∗
(0.051) (0.103) (0.056) (0.088)Age −0.109 −0.085 −0.188∗∗ −0.201∗∗
(0.091) (0.074) (0.081) (0.080)Education 1.177 0.961 3.015∗∗∗ 3.338∗∗∗
(1.055) (1.145) (1.091) (1.124)Female 2.376 3.093 −5.198∗∗ −4.710∗∗
(1.857) (2.032) (2.276) (2.074)Bureau. Corruption 0.041 0.061∗ 0.017 0.021
(0.044) (0.036) (0.047) (0.040)Mayor Approval −0.136 −0.102 −0.103∗ −0.083
(0.099) (0.105) (0.053) (0.084)Satisfaction Services −0.012 −0.033 −0.791 −0.942
(0.725) (0.809) (0.966) (0.936)Income −0.982 −1.451∗ −0.059 −0.476
(0.891) (0.880) (0.945) (0.950)Fon −2.058 −1.621 3.914 3.367
(2.797) (2.790) (2.387) (2.983)Constant 33.013∗∗∗ 31.573∗∗∗ 31.574∗∗∗ 33.643∗∗∗
(5.350) (7.910) (6.849) (7.867)
Municipal FE N Y N YObservations 619 619 535 535
Notes: Columns 1 and 2 include all control group observations in the fullsample, combining above- and below-average vote districts. Columns 3 and4 include all treatment observations in the full sample. The outcome is therespondent’s preferred resident tax contribution to the municipal budget, asa proportion out of 100 West African francs. District vote shareis the shareof the district’s votes that went to the mayor’s party in the last elections.Columns 1 and 3 are pooled samples and do not include municipal fixedeffects; Columns 2 and 4 are hierarchical linear models grouped at the dis-trict level. District clustered errors are used in pooled samples. Controlsinclude age, gender, sex, neighborhood service indicators, and Fon ethnicgroup indicator ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01
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Table 7
Negative Positive
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Information −1.601 2.638 1.353 −7.983(2.178) (2.336) (1.750) (6.015)
District vote share −0.044 −0.005 −0.269 −0.322(1.115) (1.115) (0.272) (0.250)
Info*vote share −0.095∗ 0.153∗
(0.052) (0.080)Age −0.185∗∗∗ −0.184∗∗∗ −0.095 −0.096
(0.068) (0.069) (0.114) (0.113)Education 2.315∗∗ 2.312∗∗ 2.180∗∗ 2.293∗∗
(1.142) (1.165) (1.005) (0.992)Female −0.673 −0.598 −1.117 −1.259
(1.419) (1.470) (2.396) (2.455)Income −0.448 −0.410 −1.247 −1.287
(1.074) (1.103) (0.815) (0.790)Bureau. Corruption 0.066∗ 0.068∗ −0.018 −0.016
(0.035) (0.035) (0.073) (0.072)Mayor Approval −0.132∗∗ −0.145∗∗ −0.049 −0.050
(0.062) (0.059) (0.057) (0.058)Satisfaction Services −1.587 −1.591 0.171 0.203
(0.980) (0.979) (0.650) (0.665)Fon 1.479 1.542 −0.378 −0.298
(2.482) (2.387) (2.852) (2.840)Constant 37.944∗∗ 35.754∗∗ 43.397∗∗∗ 46.611∗∗∗
(17.584) (17.717) (13.490) (12.123)
Municipal FE Y Y Y YObservations 581 581 573 573
Notes: All columns are OLS regressions. Columns 1 and 2 include observa-tions from districts with a below-average vote. Columns 3 and 4 include ob-servations from districts with an above-average vote. The information vari-able is a binary indicator for whether the respondent received informationabout their relative district vote share for the mayor’s party. The outcomeis the respondent’s preferred tax contribution to the municipal budget, as aproportion out of 100 West African francs. District vote shareis the shareof the district’s votes that went to the mayor’s party in the last elections.District clustered errors are used across all models. Controls include age,gender, sex, neighborhood service indicators, and Fon ethnic group indicator∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01
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Figure 1: Southern Benin Map
The southern arrondissements (districts) of Benin, according to populationdensity. This map identifies the 5 municipalities (and three urban zones)used to select sample districts.
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Table 8
Below-Avg Above-Avg Diff. p-val
Tax Visit 0.300 0.440 -0.140 0Minimize Corruption [1-5] 1.760 2.080 -0.320 0
Minimize Tax Corruption [1-5] 1.770 2.020 -0.250 0.002Perceived Sponsor - Gov 0.220 0.260 -0.040 0.073
Satisfaction Services [1-5] 3.380 3.290 0.090 0.107Prop. Fon Ethnic Group 0.85 0.85 0 0.891
Table 9: Distances to City Hall
MunicipalityBelow-Average
(km)Above-Average
(km)Diff(km) p-val
All 6.21 5.79 0.42 0.832Ouidah 5.0 6.0 -1.0Adjarra 4.5 8.5 -4.0Bohicon 5.0 1.0 4.0Cotonou 10.5 6.0 3.5Porto-Novo 4.67 4.1 0.56
178
