Isaac William Martin

Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties

Previous research has argued that income inequality reduces peoples trust in other people, and that declining social trust in the United States in recent decades has been due to rising levels of income inequality. Using multilevel models fitted to data from the General Social Survey, this paper substantially qualifies these arguments. We show that while people are less trusting in US states with higher income inequality, this association holds only cross-sectionally, not longitudinally; since the 1970s, states experiencing larger increases in inequality have not suffered systematically larger declines in trust. For counties, there is no statistically significant relationship either cross-sectionally or longitudinally. There is therefore only limited empirical support for the argument that inequality influences generalized social trust; and the declining trust of recent decades certainly cannot be attributed to rising inequality.

High School Segregation and Access to the University of California

Using institutional data on fall 1999 freshman admissions, we document the existence and magnitude of inequalities among California high schools in the access they provide to the University of California (UC). Because high schools are segregated by socioeconomic status and race, we examine how schools that differ on these dimensions also differ in their rates of admission to UC. We find that UC admission rates are grossly unequal between the public and private sectors and within each sector. Different groups, however, face different barriers. Schools where the student body is heavily Latino tend to have low per capita admissions because fewer students apply; schools where the student body is heavily African American tend to have low per capita admissions because fewer applicants are admitted. Our research suggests the need for both high school outreach to increase applications and contextual review of applications to reduce inequalities in the admission of applicants.

The thunder of history: The origins and development of the new fiscal sociology

Scholars have long recognized the importance of taxation to the study of modern society. In recent decades, a new and innovative wave of multidisciplinary scholarship on the sources and consequences of taxation has begun to emerge. In this introductory chapter, we chronicle the historical roots, recent developments, and future promise of this emerging field, which we call the new fiscal sociology. More specifically, in our introduction we crystallize the developments in this recent scholarship. We argue that new comparative and historical perspectives provide several innovative insights about taxation. First, that economic development does not inevitably lead to a particular form of taxation, but rather that institutional context, political conflicts, and contingent events lead to a diversity of tax states in the modern world. Second, that taxpayer consent is best explained not as coercion, predation, or illusion, but as a collective bargain in which taxpayers give up resources in exchange for collective goods that amplify the society’s productive capacities. And, third, because taxation is central not only to the state’s capacity in war, but in fact to all of social life, the different forms of the tax state explain many of the political and social differences between countries. The essays in this collection, written by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, showcase the new fiscal sociology. The contributors explore the many ways in which the relations of taxation are pervasive, dynamic, and central to modernity. The specific chapters address the social and historical sources of tax policy, the problem of taxpayer consent, and the social and cultural consequences of taxation. They trace fundamental connections between tax institutions and macro-historical phenomena – wars, shifting racial boundaries, religious traditions, gender regimes, labor systems, and more. (Contributors include: Charles Tilly, Isaac William Martin, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Monica Prasad, Joseph J. Thorndike, Andrea Louise Campbell, Fred Block, Christopher Howard, Evan S. Lieberman, Eisaku Ide, Sven Steinmo, Naomi Feldman, Joel Slemrod, Robin L. Einhorn, Edgar Kiser, Audrey Sacks, Beverly Moran, Edward McCaffery, W. Elliot Brownlee, and John L. Campbell.)

Who Are the Foreclosed? A Statistical Portrait of America in Crisis

Data from the National Suburban Survey from September 2010 permit the first statistical portrait of Americans displaced by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. The average person who has experienced home mortgage foreclosure since September 2007 resembles the average American but is somewhat likely to be younger, Latino, and a parent. The foreclosed are also more likely to report various other measures of financial distress, including recent job loss. The experience of foreclosure is associated with more problems in the neighborhoods where respondents currently reside, including such problems as crime, unemployment, and a lack of affordable housing. Respondents who have not personally lost a home, but who know the foreclosed, are also experiencing more economic distress and more neighborhood problems than those who have not. These descriptive findings suggest the human costs of the foreclosure crisis and the limits of informal social safety nets for addressing those costs.

Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938–19581

Beginning in 1938, some American business groups campaigned to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and limit the federal taxation of income and wealth. Although their proposed upward‐redistributive policy would benefit few voters, it won the support of 31 state legislatures. To explain this outcome, this article offers a theory of strategic policy crafting by advocacy groups. Such groups may succeed even in otherwise unfavorable institutional environments if they craft their proposals to fit the salient policy context. Archival evidence and event history analysis support this hypothesis. Public opinion also helps explain legislative support for upward‐redistributive policy.

Do Living Wage Policies Diffuse

This research note examines the conditions under which large U.S. cities pass living wage laws. It updates the only published article on the subject with new data and improved analytic methods. First, it shows that poverty, privatization, and the density of community organizations are associated with policy passage. Second, it provides new quantitative evidence that the living wage movement is, in part, a diffusion process associated with national community-organizing networks.

Proposition 13 Fever: How California's Tax Limitation Spread

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Volume 1, Issue 1 Proposition 13 Fever: How California’s Tax Limitation Spread Isaac William Martin University of California, San Diego Abstract Much of the best scholarship on the economic or fiscal impacts of Proposition 13 probably understates those impacts, because it considers only impacts of property tax limitation in California. Proposition 13 spilled over from California into other states. It spilled over from the property tax into other policies. And scholars have even begun to accumulate evidence that it spilled over from the state arena into fed- eral fiscal policy as well. Proposition 13 was a pivotal moment that changed how Congress perceived public opinion on taxes and government spending in general. KEYWORDS: Proposition 13, taxes, property tax, California politics www.bepress.com/cjpp

Property Tax Limitation and Racial Inequality in Effective Tax Rates

In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of property tax limitation exacerbate racial inequality, providing the greatest reduction in effective tax rates to white homeowners. In the aggregate, these inequalities result in substantially unequal tax savings that might not survive democratic scrutiny if they were distributed as direct subsidies. This inequality may be especially problematic insofar as tax privileges for property owners effectively disguise a public benefit as a private property right.

Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement

Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residents of gentrifying neighborhoods from displacement, by merging the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with a decennial Census-tract-level measure of gentrification and a new data set on state-level property tax policy covering the period 1987 to 2009. We find some evidence that property tax pressure can trigger involuntary moves by homeowners, but no evidence that such displacement is more common in gentrifying neighborhoods than elsewhere, nor that property tax limitation protects long-term homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. We do find evidence that gentrification directly displaces renters.

Tax policy and tax protest in 20 rich democracies, 1980–2010†

Why are some policies protested more than others? New data on protest against eight categories of taxation in twenty rich democracies from 1980 to 2010 reveal that economically and socially concentrated taxes are protested most, whereas taxes that confer entitlement to benefits are protested least. Other features of policy design often thought to affect the salience or visibility of costs are unimportant for explaining the frequency of protest. These findings overturn a folk theory that political sociology has inherited from classical political economy; clarify the conditions under which policy threats provoke protest; and shed light on how welfare states persist.