Tax Salience and Citizen Evaluation of Government

This paper examines how tax salience—or how aware individuals are of their property tax payments that finance local public services—correlates with citizens’ evaluation of their local government. Drawing on theories of expectation formation for public services and fiscal illusion, we hypothesize that reduced tax salience is associated with lower normative expectations, which will correlate with increased reported satisfaction with their local government and a higher willingness to support additional taxation. Using data from a nationwide survey of homeowners (n = 10,066), we provide evidence of robust correlations between lower tax salience and more positive citizen evaluation of government. This paper contributes to a growing literature in public administration that finds that the design of tax systems, tax complexity, and other factors outside of the control of street-level bureaucrats that provide public services can influence how individuals evaluate a government or public service.