Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Andrea Campbell

Race, Racism, and American Tax Attitudes

Andrea Louise Campbell, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, MIT

Abstract: What factors explain Americans’ attitudes toward taxes?  Previous research has upheld material stakes, with taxes as an exception to the usual dearth of self-interest findings in public opinion. Or scholars have emphasized partisan differences, especially in our polarized era.  But earlier research has tended to focus on tax attitudes and politics only during certain moments, like the tax revolt of the 1970s or the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s, and only on certain taxes, such as the income, estate, and property taxes. Examining a broader array of taxes over additional periods of time, I find instead that racial resentment is a powerful and consistent predictor of whites’ tax attitudes. And the tax attitudes of Black and Hispanic Americans, which are rarely examined, are much more negative than we might anticipate for groups that are otherwise more liberal and supportive of government spending than whites. I discuss these and other findings from my forthcoming book, Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes.

Andrea Louise Campbell is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science at MIT. Professor Campbell's interests include American politics, political behavior, public opinion, and political inequality, particularly their intersection with social welfare policy, health policy, and tax policy. She is the author of four previous books: Policy Feedback: How Policies Shape Politics with Daniel Béland and R. Kent Weaver (Cambridge Elements in Public Policy, 2022); Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle (Chicago, 2014); The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Provision with Kimberly J. Morgan (Oxford, 2011); and How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Citizen Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, 2003). Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Studies in American Political Development, and Health Affairs, among others.

Campbell holds an AB degree from Harvard and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation and by residential fellowships at the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research program. She was inducted into the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2007 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. Recent awards include the APSA Public Policy Section’s Excellence in Mentoring Award (2020), the Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award for her first book (2021), and MIT’s MacVicar Fellowship for contributions to undergraduate education (2024).

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