Taxation, legitimacy, and media discourse in Jordan

Abstract

This study investigates how taxation is discursively constructed in Jordanian media as a contested domain of legitimacy, authority, and citizenship. Using qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis, it integrates a dialectical–relational and a socio-cognitive perspective to examine a purposively assembled corpus of 22 Arabic-language news reports, headlines, and opinion texts drawn from 13 media and institutional sources relevant to Jordanian tax discourse published between 2018 and 2026. Analysis proceeds through an explicit, inductively developed coding scheme comprising eight discursive strategies. The findings show that institutional discourse frames taxation as legally inevitable, morally justified, and administratively neutral through authorization, abstraction, reassurance, criminalization, and technocratic quantification. Conversely, counter-discourses portray taxation as unjust extraction, emphasizing economic burden, corruption, and moral inequality; within this corpus, such voices appear mainly in opinion genres and remain comparatively marginal. Overall, the analysis suggests that media discourse tends to redefine citizenship in terms of compliance rather than participation. The study extends Critical Discourse Analysis research on fiscal governance to a non-Western setting and demonstrates how power and legitimacy are negotiated through language.