Politicians, bureaucrats, and tax morale: What shapes tax compliance attitudes?

What actions do governments take that may affect individual trust? Although the literature on tax morale has reported a positive relationship between trust in government and tax morale, it is less known what is that government does to elicit trust among taxpayers. Which government organizations are most likely to produce those actions? This paper examines how governments elicit tax morale by testing the proposition that trust in government is built by the way citizens are treated when receiving their share of public goods and services from government institutions charged with the delivery of those goods and services, known as the output side (Rothstein, 2005). We use data from close to forty countries in the 2005-2007 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) and after controlling for the level of political rights and civil liberties, we find that trust in administrative (output) government institutions positively influences tax morale, especially in the case of people living in democratic countries.