Representation without Taxation: An Empirical Assessment of the Validity of the Accountability Argument underlying the Reform of Local Government Finance in England

Spatial patterns in local taxation: tax mimicking or error mimicking?

“…The set of regressors includes a number of variables re¯ecting the budget constraint structure (Foster et al 1980): the per capita rateable value (a measure of the tax base available to the local authority); the Block Grant per capita (the equalization transfer made by central government to municipalities) and; the proportion of domestic local tax base. Since the local tax rate applied both to domestic and to nondomestic (industrial and commercial) properties, the proportion of domestic tax base constitutes a measure of the extent to which households were asked to contribute to local spending (Barnett et al, 1991).…”

Accountability and the Poll Tax: The Impact on Local Authority Budgets of the Reform of Local Government Finance in England

“…The fact that no such responses were detected is a strong indication that the accountability arguments underlying the reforms were spurious. Another study by Barnett, Barrow and Smith (1991) has suggested that there was no empirical link between the accountability concepts developed here and overspending levels before the 1990 reforms, and that there was therefore no ex ante support for the government's accountability argument. The study described here offers strong ex post support for those findings.…”

Fiduciary Government: Decentring Property and Taxpayers' Interests

“…More recently, government policy has attempted to link voting, hence accountability, to taxation (e.g. Department of the Environment [DoE], 1986; Barnett et al, 1991;Barnett and Knox, 1992;Sanderson, 1995). Taxpayer centrality challenges the specific communitarianism of representative democracy, with its privileging of rights over obligations (see also DoE, 1986: 6-7).…”