Marlies Glasius, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Tax Politics of the Super-Rich

Taxing the super-rich—individuals with assets worth $50 million or more—presents problems. While their wealth kept rising, wealth-based taxation de¬clined and super-rich tax avoidance flourished. The super-rich are now under pressure, as wealth-based taxation is gaining salience in political debates and international tax cooperation compromises tax avoidance. But in research on the problem of wealth-based taxation, the views and actions of the super-rich themselves have been curiously absent. This project’s guiding question is: When and how do the super-rich deploy their resources against or for wealth-based taxation?
Sub-project 1 uses my recently compiled dataset on the tax politics of the world’s 100 richest billionaires living in democracies to examine change over time in their tax speech and tax behaviour, and to consider whether billionaire tax behaviour is responsive to media shaming and/or to punitive sanctions. Sub-project 2 examines the minority of the super-rich who advocate for more wealth-based taxation, to understand what motivates them and how effective their brand of activism is. Sub-project 3 relates billionaire tax behaviour to their philanthropic endeavours.

Recommended Reading

Glasius, Marlies. The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement. Routledge, 2006.
Glasius, Marlies, and Armine Ishkanian. “Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement between Activists and NGOs.” Voluntas 26, no. 6 (2015): 2620–2644.
Glasius, Marlies. Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Glasius, Marlies (Dordrecht [u.a.], 2014)

Surreptitious symbiosis : engagement between activists and NGOs