Bureaucratic Power and Tax Effort: The Case of France (1876–2017)

Abstract

Throughout history, the conventional explanations for the tax burden have neglected a crucial fact. Taxes serve the strong. In a democracy, power belongs de jure with the people. Once democracy gives way to bureaucracy, civil servants acquire considerable political leverage. This article argues that the French democracy has indeed become a bureaucracy, a transformation which casts light on the history of the tax burdens in France over the 1870–2017 period. An indicator of bureaucratic power (P) is created in order to track the transformation of French democracy into a bureaucracy. Public officials have the power to impose their tax preferences when the abstention rate is high (abs) and their proportion in the electorate high (PE), when they have succeeded in being elected to parliament (PP) or to be appointed to the government (PG), $P=\frac{(abs\times PE)+PP+PG}{3}$ . Both a time series analysis and a Granger test are used, which reveal that the tax effort in France is positively and significantly correlated with this indicator of bureaucratic power.