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Marketing Taxation? Experimental Evidence on Enforcement and Bargaining in Malawian Markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2025

LUCY MARTIN Open the ORCID record for LUCY MARTIN [Opens in a new window] ,
BRIGITTE SEIM Open the ORCID record for BRIGITTE SEIM [Opens in a new window] ,
SIMON HOELLERBAUER Open the ORCID record for SIMON HOELLERBAUER [Opens in a new window]  and
LUIS A. CAMACHO Open the ORCID record for LUIS A. CAMACHO [Opens in a new window]
LUCY MARTIN*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States
BRIGITTE SEIM*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, United States
SIMON HOELLERBAUER*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States
LUIS A. CAMACHO*
Affiliation:
George Washington University, United States
*
Corresponding author: Lucy Martin, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States, lucy.martin@unc.edu.
Brigitte Seim, Associate Professor, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, United States, bseim@umn.edu.
Simon Hoellerbauer, Lecturer, Data Analytics and Computational Social Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States, shoellerbaue@umass.edu.
Luis A. Camacho, Professorial Lecturer, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, United States, luisacs@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Understanding how to increase government revenue via taxation is a core puzzle in state development. Taxation is critical for states to fund public goods, and may have positive spillover effects on citizen-state relations. We argue that tax compliance will be higher when governments employ community-level, rather than individual-level, interventions. To test whether it is more effective to focus such interventions on top-down (TD) enforcement or bottom-up (BU) quasi-voluntary compliance, we ran a multi-arm field experiment in 128 markets in Malawi. We find that the BU intervention significantly increased tax compliance by 40%. The TD intervention had a less robust effect on compliance, although not significantly different from that in the BU group. The BU intervention, but not the TD, also increased trust in government, satisfaction with services, and political engagement. The results show that community-level tax interventions can increase compliance and that quasi-voluntary approaches can positively reshape citizen-state relations.

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Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , First View , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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