Contract partner with no rights: the construction of the taxpayer subject in the Belarusian government press

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the construction of the taxpayer in the government press in Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country. The analysis shows that the taxpayer is articulated as a marginal, apolitical, agency-lacking subject in a hierarchical relationship with the government, reflective of the paternalistic ideology of the Belarus state. The study expands the current understanding of the taxpayer subject as a discursively privileged actor by recasting it in more context-sensitive terms, as a construct that reproduces the configuration of power in citizen-government relations and can affect citizens’ ability to treat taxpaying as a politically leveraging practice.