Political trust and inheritance taxation: evidence from four studies

Abstract

Inheritance (estate) taxation is a potentially powerful instrument for reducing inequality and raising state revenues, yet it attracts opposition well beyond the small minority who will ever pay it. We argue that political trust helps explain who supports it. Because the tax is levied episodically and reaches few citizens directly, most individuals have little experience of its workings: knowledge is low, beliefs about its incidence are often mistaken, and preferences are unsettled. Citizens are therefore poorly placed to judge whether the tax will be implemented as intended or achieve its purposes, and political trust may consequently shape their willingness to accept that uncertainty. Across four complementary studies – an 11-country panel, an embedded survey experiment, the British Election Study panel, and voting behaviour in a 2015 Swiss referendum – we show that higher political trust is consistently associated with greater support for inheritance taxation across several alternative measures. Our findings thus identify public political trust as a constraint on the political feasibility of wealth taxation and extend research on political trust to support for a specific and contested tax instrument.