%0 Journal Article
%T Framing the Taxation
%A Volha Kananovich
%J The International Journal of Press/Politics
%@ 1940-1620
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1940161218771893
%X Taxpaying constitutes a major opportunity for citizens to relate to their governments. Although it is true that paying taxes is a responsibility, it also entitles citizens to claim control over government spending, which may facilitate a greater democratization of a country¡¯s political regime. Consistent with this reasoning, a growing body of scholarship has documented a positive relationship between the size of tax revenues extracted by the state and the adherence of the country¡¯s regime to democratic values. What has been left underexplored is the role in this relationship of the media, a commonly available and relied-upon source of information about taxpaying for the public. This study offers a first contribution in this direction, by exploring the relationship between the nature of the political regime and the rhetorical construction of the concept of a taxpayer in the national press. Based on an automated content analysis of articles (N=24,969) published by ninety-two newspapers and news agencies in fifty-one countries using a set of pretrained and validated machine-learning algorithms, the study demonstrates that the less democratic a state is, the more likely it is for the national press to frame a taxpayer as a subordinate in a hierarchical relationship with the state, by discussing taxpaying in tax collection, rather than public spending, terms. The study furthers a more nuanced understanding of the place of the media in the taxation-democratization link and demonstrates the applicability of the supervised machine-learning approach to classifying frames in large cross-national samples of newspaper data
%K taxation
%K democratization
%K news
%K media framing
%K computer-assisted text analysis
%K supervised machine learning
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1940161218771893