Fiscal Citizenship in Migrant Societies: Fiscal Citizenship Survey UK, 2023

The project is a comparative study of fiscal citizenship and the impact of migration in three countries; Canada, Germany and the UK. This data focuses on the UK. We have developed a new conceptual understanding of fiscal citizenship within which we explore aspects of the relationship between willingness to pay taxes and a sense of belonging to a society.

The project had four main objectives for understanding the impact of fiscal citizenship and its relationship to migration. The project recognised the importance of taxation to the functioning of the modern state, and the impact which increasing economic instability and migration could have on the social contract to pay tax between state and individual. As the project developed the concept of fiscal citizenship and better understood the relationship which migrant populations had with tax regimes, further questions regarding the structure and administration of tax systems were generated. This included the relationship that taxpayers had with intermediaries, such as tax advisors, and the challenges faced by tax administration in terms of mobile populations and the development of tax technology.

The project produced data from a large-scale survey examining attitudes to tax and migration which was run in all three participating countries. The survey questions contained a standard set of demographic and socio-economic measures and supplemented by measures of fiscal citizenship developed specifically by the project. Four dimensions of fiscal citizenship were measured, fiscal citizen voice (measured with 7 items), fiscal citizen contribution (measured with 6 items), fiscal citizen identity (measured with 4 items), fiscal citizen tax compliance (measured with 3 items).