Anecdotal evidence from pre-modern Europe and North America suggests that rulers are forced to become more democratic once they impose a significant fiscal burden on their citizens. One difficulty in testing this “taxation causes democratization” hypothesis empirically is the endogeneity of...

Historical evidence from the industrialized world suggests that the expansion of the modern state’s capacity to tax eventually led to more democratic and less corrupt governments. Using a dataset that covers 31 sub-Saharan African countries over the 1990–2005 period, we study whether the...