Taxation and Democracy is the first book to examine the structure, politics, and historic development of taxation policies in several countries. Comparing three quite different political democracies—Sweden, Britain, and the United States—the book provides a powerful account of the ways these democracies have managed to finance their welfare programs despite widespread public resistance to taxes. Sven Steinmo argues that the different political structures of these countries produce varying tax systems and, by extension, differing social policy regimes.

According to Steinmo, all democracies face a basic dilemma—how government can be both autonomous and responsive to public wishes. This dilemma is a crucial factor in explaining their different tax systems. In the United States, for example, the system of multiple checks and balances and fragmented political authority has led to a tax system that is complex, inefficient, and has a low revenue yield. Sweden's corporatist model of government is less responsive to the will of the masses, and so the country has a surprisingly regressive tax system that is stable, efficient, and has a high revenue yield: its working class basically agrees to accept a heavy tax burden in exchange for heavy social welfare spending. The British government, which is dominated by strong parties, can virtually dictate tax policy preferences to the Parliament, and so its tax system is highly unstable, as is the distribution of tax burdens among classes. Steinmo demonstrates that the "New Institutionalism" can account for both historic continuities and political change—that common economic and political forces confronting these countries in the twentieth century were shaped by each country's changing political institutions. His study thus makes an important contribution to comparative political theory as well as to our understanding of the development of the modern welfare state.

Sven Steinmo holds the Chair in Public Policy and Political Economy at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His teaching and research interests include the field of comparative politics, public policy, institutional theory and most recently experimental social science methodology. Professor Steinmo began his teaching career at the University of Colorado in 1987 and has been visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo; Gothenburg University, Sweden; the Max Planck Institute, Köln; the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden; and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po), University of Bordeaux, France. He is also currently an Honorary Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

Professor Steinmo has been awarded multiple international honors over his career, including the Riker Prize for the best book in Political Economy (APSA), the Gabriel Almondo Prize for the best dissertation in Comparative Politics (APSA) as well as the German Marshall Fellowship, the Abe Fellowship and the STINT Advanced Researcher Grant. Steinmo's most recent book, The Evolution of Modern States, was recently awarded the Gunnar Myrdal Prize (2011), by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. In 2012 he was also awarded a European Research Council "Advanced Researcher" Grant in support of his project "Willing to Pay? Testing Institutionalist Theory with Experiments".