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Tax Revolts and Political Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Ballard C. Campbell
Ballard C. Campbell
Affiliation:
Northeastern University
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Extract

The adoption of Proposition 13 in 1978 sent shock waves throughout the American polity. California's attack on property taxes was not the first fiscal limitation adopted in the 1970s, but it carried clear national implications that the earlier measures lacked. By successfully challenging the political establishment, the initiative drive in the Golden State energized campaigns elsewhere to restrict taxes. The echo of Proposition 13 reverberated in Massachusetts, whose voters approved a cap on property taxes (Proposition 2 ½) in 1980. Citizens on the nation's two coasts had signaled thumbs down on fiscal affairs in their states.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 10 , Special Issue 1: Loss of Confidence: Politics and Policy in the 1970s , January 1998 , pp. 153 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1998

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References

Notes

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40. Nevada voters passed a Proposition 13 clone as a constitutional initiative in 1978, but they rejected it in 1980 on the required second referendum. In the intervening year the legislature adopted a tax-reform and expenditure-limit measure.

41. Moreover, states in the traditional-party/no initiative category that enacted limitation measures had lower readings on the Mayhew Traditional Party Organization scale than did the states that avoided cap laws. The three states that adopted property-levy limitations were Indiana, Louisiana, and New Mexico.

42. The median “tax burden” (state-local tax revenue as a percentage of personal income) among strong-party states where limitations were adopted was 11.6 percent and 12.2 percent where they were not. Among the weak-party states, the median tax burden among states that adopted limitations was 12.7 percent and 11.6 percent among states that did not. The tax burden among the six states where voters initiated property tax limitations (California et al.) was 12.9 percent.

The median percentage reduction in revenue dependence on local property taxes between FY 67 and FY 77 was -22 percent for all fifty states, but only -11.5 percent for the six Proposition 13-type states (California et al.), signifying that latter group had lagged in reforming property taxes.

43. Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves, chaps. 1–6; Sears and Citrin, Tax Revolt; Kaufman, “Inflation,” 217–19; Couch, Winston W., Bollens, J., and Scott, S., California Government and Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1981), esp. 234–35, 276–77Google Scholar; Adams, Secret of the Tax Revolt, chap. 6.

44. On proposition 2 ½: Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves, 162–63, chap. 8; Tevdt, “Enough Is Enough”; Adams, Secret of the Tax Revolt, chap. 12; Susskind, Lawrence and Horan, Cynthia, “Proposition 2 ½: The Response to Tax Restrictions in Massachusetts,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science (1983), 57–71Google Scholar; Hale, Dennis, “Massachusetts: William F. Weld and the End of Business as Usual,” in Beyle, Thad L., ed., Governors and Hard Times (Washington, D.C., 1992).Google Scholar

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46. Stark, Bennett S., “The Political Economy of State Public Finance: A Model of the Determinants of Revenue Policy: the Illinois Case, 1850–1970” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982)Google Scholar; Gove, Samuel K. and Masotti, Louis H., eds., After Daley: Chicago Politics in Transition (Urbana, III. 1981)Google Scholar, esp. chapters by Gove and Milton Rakove; Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves, 300–301; New York Times, 8 March 1979; Parker, Joan A., The Illinois Tax Increase of 1983: Summit and Resolution (Springfield, III., 1984), 10–12.Google Scholar

47. Dwyre, “Disorganized Politics,” 44–46. Break, George, “Proposition 13's Tenth Birthday,” in Stocker, Frederick D., ed., Proposition 13: A Ten-Year Retrospective (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 191–93Google Scholar, discounted a major shift toward regressivity in California.

48. Suskind, “Proposition 2 ½,” 160–63; Division of Local Services, Massachusetts Department of Revenue, City and Town (November 1994), 4, and (December 1993), 6.

49. Rodney T. Smith, “Local Fiscal Arrangements, Home Rule, and California's Fiscal Constitution After Proposition 13,” in Stocker, Proposition 13, 79–80; O'Sullivan, Arthur, Sexton, Terri A., and Sheffrin, Steven M., Property Taxes and Tax Revolts: The Legacy of Proposition 13 (New York, 1995), 115, 137CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwadron, California and the American Tax Revolt, 80.

50. See the essays by Richard W. Gable on California and Dennis Hall on Massachusetts in Beyle, Governors and Hard Times, and the chapters by Jeffrey I. Chapman on California and Bruce Wallin on Massachusetts in Gold, Steven D., ed., The Fiscal Crisis of the States (Washington, D.C., 1995).Google Scholar

51. Sears and Citrin, Tax Revolt, 41.

52. Campbell, The Growth of American Government, chap. 10.

53. Campbell, The Growth of American Government, 2–5, and Federalism and Public Performance: Perspectives on American Political Development (forthcoming) develops this typology.