The successes and failures of governments in their attempts to collect taxes are a critical source of variation in the types of relationships that exist between states and societies around the world. Although there are other political arenas in which the authority and efficacy of the national state can be examined, it is in the realm of taxation that we have relatively good, comparable data, useful for cross-national analysis. Which data to look at and how to interpret those data are not so obvious, however, and it is necessary to justify how taxation outcomes reflect more broadly on political life and the development of the modern state.

This chapter provides a framework for understanding the basic building blocks of a national tax system and develops a set of tools for cross-national comparison. It reveals how the dynamic process of taxation can vary in terms of patterns of cooperation and conflict between state actors and the economically privileged groups within society who control the lion's share of taxable resources.