Building the Modern State in Developing Countries: Perceptions of Public Safety and (Un)willingness to Pay Taxes in Mexico*

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220943848
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220943848

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(3) 423 –451

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220943848

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Article

Building the Modern State

in Developing Countries:

Perceptions of Public Safety

and (Un)willingness to Pay

Taxes in Mexico*

Gustavo Flores-Macías

Cornell University

Mariano Sánchez-Talanquer

Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

Abstract

What is the relationship between taxation and public safety? Contrary to studies

suggesting that personal victimization and heightened perceptions of insecurity

increase pro-social attitudes and support for state intervention in the form of greater

taxation, this article argues that such concerns decrease willingness to pay taxes to

address public safety. It estimates what citizens are willing to pay to reduce crime, using

an original representative survey conducted in Mexico and relying on the contingent

valuation method to assess the value of nonmarket goods. Attitudes toward taxation

are found to respond to subjective, sociotropic assessments of public safety rather

than to actual risk or occurrences of individual victimization. These findings counter

the conventional wisdom that demand for personal security enables greater extraction,

a central proposition in classic accounts of state building. Showing that willingness to

accept heavier taxation may be weakest among those who perceive the gravest need

for security, the study adds precision to theories of fiscal exchange.

Keywords

taxes, public safety, victimization, Mexico, contingent valuation, willingness to pay,

state capacity

Corresponding Author:

Mariano Sánchez-Talanquer, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, División de Estudios

Políticos, Carretera México-Toluca 3655, Col. Lomas de Santa Fe, Ciudad de México, CP 01210 Mexico.

Email: m.sancheztalanquer@cide.edu

*This special issue of Politics & Society titled “Societies under Stress” features an introduction by David

Garland and four articles that were presented as part of the workshop series held at the University of

Southern Denmark, December 2017, organized by Marianne Ulriksen and Peter Starke, and at The Ohio State

University, November 2018, organized by Sarah Brooks, Sarah Berens, and Georg Wenzelburger and partly

funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Ref 30.18.0.134.PO.

943848PASXXX10.1177/0032329220943848Politics & SocietyFlores-Macías and Sánchez-Talanquer

research-article2020

424 Politics & Society 48(3)

What is the relationship between taxation and the provision of law and order? The

literature on state capacity has long regarded them as crucial and tightly linked fea-

tures of strong states: to extract revenue from the population, rulers accommodated the

demand for public safety, among other public goods.1 Concerns over security were

therefore at the core of popular consent to a stronger fiscal state.

However, the nature of that relationship has typically been examined at the macro

level and overlooked in contemporary contexts. Although a link between protection

and taxes might have emerged in the early state-building period, we know little about

how it operates both at the individual or micro level and in modern settings. Further,

although the literature has often relied on both taxation and the rule of law as indica-

tors of capacity,2 they are commonly treated either in isolation or bulked together as

covarying dimensions of the same concept. The result has been a muddling of the two

and a lack of nuance in our understanding of how one might affect the other.

In this article we advance our understanding of the relationship by examining the

effect of victimization and concern for crime on individuals’ willingness to shoulder a

greater tax burden to address insecurity. We evaluate this relationship using original

data from a nationally representative survey fielded in Mexico, among the countries in

Latin America with the lowest fiscal extraction and experiencing the wave of citizen

insecurity that has plagued many democracies in the region. Drawing on the contin-

gent valuation method—a technique to assess the value of nonmarket goods such as

public safety—we first estimate the size of the fiscal sacrifice citizens are willing to

make for a 30 percent reduction in crime. We then investigate the sources of individ-

ual-level variation in willingness to pay taxes in exchange for such improvement in

security conditions.

We show that concern for crime decreases individuals’ willingness to contribute

taxes rather than expanding the margin for state extraction. We also find that attitudes

toward increased taxation respond to subjective assessments about public safety con-

ditions in society at large, not to personal experiences or the actual risk of victimiza-

tion where citizens live. We suggest that these results emerge because perceptions of

public safety in the country as a whole are connected to evaluations of state perfor-

mance and complicity with crime, which play a critical role in the formation of atti-

tudes toward taxation.

The theoretical argument and evidence in this article suggest that influential models

of preference formation in advanced democracies, as well as findings regarding the

effects of victimization and fear of crime in other contexts, may not apply to develop-

ing countries. First, our findings run counter to the conclusion that individual risk

exposure is a strong motivation for more statist attitudes, including support for

increased tax revenues.3 This logic has been prevalent in political-economic models

and underlies recent arguments about the effects of individual concern with potential

crime victimization on policy preferences in the developed world.4

Second, the results also contrast with approaches that suggest that exposure to crime

and violence predisposes citizens to act more civically.5 At least in the domain of taxa-

tion, an important dimension of civic behavior, we do not find evidence in that direc-

tion. Instead, the evidence is consistent with a fiscal-contract view of state-society