compliance. In these cases, perceptions of government services and the quality of government in general drive tax compliance, even without enforcement provisions (Doerrenberg and Peichl 2017; Bott et al. 2017; Hallsworth et al. 2017). Similarly, Besley et al. (2015) found that perceived fairness of government tax policy was important for tax compliance, which also corresponds to a sense of reciprocity.

In sum, there is now a broad body of experimental evidence that demonstrates that higher tax morale significantly affects the willingness of individuals to comply with tax regimes. However, we should note potential disconnects between laboratory findings regarding participatory decision-making and “real world” policy implementation processes. Additional research efforts have sought to address this issue through case studies, large-N cross-national surveys, and randomized, controlled trials. Schneider and Baquero (2006) closely analyzed the tax revenue collection system in Porto Alegre, Brazil, during the early days of the city’s pioneering Participatory Budgeting (PB) program. They find that government officials invested heavily in building administrative capacity to better capture taxes as they developed the PB program. The municipal government significantly reduced late tax payments as well as non-payments in the ensuing years. Part of this result could be due to improved facilitation, but Schneider and Baquero provide interview evidence from governing elites and media sources that people were more willing to pay their taxes because of government officials’ success in producing public goods through PB. Unfortunately, Schneider and Baquero did not provide any evidence that more closely linked taxpayers’ attitudes to their tax compliance behavior. Spada (2012) also evaluated Participatory Budgeting’s impact on taxation and found a long-term, positive relationship between PB and tax-share of municipal revenue, though a negative short-term relationship. Again, a lack of data prevented an examination of the mechanisms driving both short and long-term relationships.

Randomized controlled trials represent an important means to collect new data and evaluate relationships between political institutions and tax compliance. Beuermann and Amelina (2014) led an important, recent, RCT that assigned two different types of participatory programs across three Russian regions. One treatment involved capacity-building around Participatory Budgeting, using workshops over a two-week period to provide information to government officials regarding how they could incorporate citizens into budget-related decision-making. A second intervention was much more intensive—it involved training and then supporting local officials over the course of a year. These officials provided administrative support to governments and CSO activists as they sought to implement local transparency and participatory initiatives.

Beuermann and Amelina’s study produced mixed results. In two of the three regions, the treatments were not associated with any changes in civic engagement, quality of public hearings, and satisfaction with public services. But in the third region the authors found that both types of interventions had significant and positive impacts on civic engagement, quality of public hearings, and satisfaction with public services. In this region, the policy intervention that focused on citizen participation as well as the programs geared toward improving service delivery and state capacity both had positive impacts on tax revenue collections. They argue that the prior experience with decentralization in the more 6