How conservative politicians persuaded voters to support tax cuts for the rich and corporations

My article "Winning the votes for institutional change" investigates how U.S. administrations successfully legitimated radical, unequal income tax cuts during the Reagan and Bush Jr. eras. While most OECD countries have reduced top tax rates and taxes on corporate income since the 1980s, the U.S. experience stands out in terms of the scale and inequality of the reforms. The tax cuts significantly eroded tax progressivity, benefitting a small economic elite. Existing institutionalist theories emphasize that U.S. institutions facilitate continuity or incremental change and cannot fully explain how such transformative reforms occurred or gained lasting support.

The article analyzes the Reagan and Bush tax cuts using a content analysis. It finds that long-term policy stability depended on how well officials used compromise strategies to build discursive alignment across party lines as well as enabling public support. While Reagan’s 1981 tax cut did not produce lasting consensus and was partially reversed, later reforms were structured in more sophisticated discursive negotiation, contributing to their durability.