Isaac William Martins
Biographic Data
| ID | 251464 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Isaac William Martins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Isaac William |
| FAMILY NAME | Martins |
| SIGNATURE | MARTINS I W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7470-636X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 314 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What Drives Displacement? Involuntary Mobility and the Faces of Gentrification
Recent quantitative studies on the relationship between gentrification and residential displacement have produced inconsistent findings. We examine whether these differences may be attributed to variation in the conceptualization and measurement of gentrification by testing a variety of different operational definitions of gentrification while holding data sources and other methodological decisions fixed. We treat gentrification as a family of re…
Broken Cities: Inside the Global Housing Crisis
What Makes a Tax Policy Popular? Predicting Referendum Votes from Policy Text
What kinds of taxation are most politically sustainable in a democracy? The authors answer this question by applying natural language processing and machine learning techniques to a large, new corpus of digitized documents describing municipal tax policies of heterogeneous design that have been directly subjected to popular referendum in the state of California. The authors find that tax policies of different description vary systematically in th…
The Political Sociology of Public Finance and the Fiscal Sociology of Politics
We are living in a golden age for the political sociology of public finance. The study of taxation and public debt often has been assumed to belong to the domain of economics, but fiscal policies, like other public policies, are the outcomes of political processes that can be studied sociologically, and the eclectic theoretical toolkit of contemporary political sociology – stocked as it is with concepts and middle-range theories from pluralist, i…
Racial Context and Political Support for California School Taxes
Objective To determine how racial context influences school districts’ ability to raise taxes and whether it is mitigated by racial context. Method Panel regression models are fit to a data set of 293 parcel tax measures and 967 California school districts from 1997 to 2010, including data on the racial composition of enrolled students, the district population, and the school board, with controls for features of the policy and the social, politic…
American Inequality in the Long Run
Policy Design and the Politics of City Revenue: Evidence from California Municipal Ballot Measures
Residents of the United States rely on municipal governments to deliver important public goods but are often reluctant to pay for those goods. Can tax policy design affect voters’ propensity to say yes to local taxes? We answer this question by analyzing a new database of 929 tax increases of heterogeneous design that were proposed to California voters from 1996 to 2010. We find that voters’ willingness to raise a municipal tax varies with the ch…
Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections
Local taxation produces consequential resource inequalities among public school districts, but little is known about how policy design affects taxpayers’ willingness to pay for schooling. We show that voters are more likely to approve local school taxes if the policy is written to require citizen–state consultation on how the funds are spent. In a sample of 236 California school district elections, the promise of indirect consultation with a citi…
Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement
Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residen…
Tax policy and tax protest in 20 rich democracies, 1980-2010
Why are some policies protested more than others? New data on protest against eight categories of taxation in twenty rich democracies from 1980 to 2010 reveal that economically and socially concentrated taxes are protested most, whereas taxes that confer entitlement to benefits are protested least. Other features of policy design often thought to affect the salience or visibility of costs are unimportant for explaining the frequency of protest. T…
Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe
New Sociology of Housing
Property Tax Limitation and Racial Inequality in Effective Tax Rates
In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of …
Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
Reading The Great Transformation
Reading the Great Transformation The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 (orig. 1944). The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014. 296 pp. Isaac William Martin University of California – San Diego [email protected] Theory Economic Sociology Political Sociolog…
Old-World Tea Parties
Wenkai He. Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China
The fiscal breakdown of Qing China, which opened the way for the Chinese revolution of 1911, was surely one of the most important events of the twentieth century. But why was the Qing state vulnerable to fiscal breakdown? It had a productive system of land taxes and excises. Responsibility for assessing and collecting taxes was in the hands of salaried bureaucrats who were selected by competitive examination and subject to rigorous bookkeeping re…
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent
For anyone wanting to understand the anti-tax activists of today, including notable defenders of wealth inequality like the Koch brothers, the historical account in Rich People's Movements is an essential guide
The Social Origins of the Texas Tax Club Movement, 1924–1925
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Fiscal protest in thirteen welfare states
Why does the fiscal burden of the welfare state inspire more protest in some societies than others? Quantitative analysis of fiscal protest in 13 European countries from 1980 to 1995, combined with in-depth comparative-historical analysis of selected countries, shows that fiscal protest was most prevalent where there was a poor fit between tax policy and social spending commitments. Policy incoherence produced pressure for fiscal reforms, which i…
Taxation, the State and Society: The Fiscal Sociology of Interventionist Democracy
Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged
Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties
What We Talk About When We Talk About Taxes
Taxes are a preeminent issue in domestic politics, but the prevalence, content, and shape of public discussion on taxation is often perplexing to social researchers. We argue that part of the confusion arises from the lack of qualitative data on the meanings Americans associate with taxation. In order to remedy this lack we conducted semi-structured interviews with white, Southern, small business owners. In answering our questions, our respondent…
Dawn of the Living Wage: The Diffusion of a Redistributive Municipal Policy
From 1994 to 1999, 22 large American cities passed “living wage” laws that mandate wages above poverty for certain workers in the private sector. The author argues that political conditions, rather than economic conditions such as urban poverty, best explain the emergence and success of the living wage movement. Quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that living wage policies result from the interaction of national progressive networks with …
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties
Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement
Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residen…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Taxes
Taxes are a preeminent issue in domestic politics, but the prevalence, content, and shape of public discussion on taxation is often perplexing to social researchers. We argue that part of the confusion arises from the lack of qualitative data on the meanings Americans associate with taxation. In order to remedy this lack we conducted semi-structured interviews with white, Southern, small business owners. In answering our questions, our respondent…
Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938-1958
Beginning in 1938, some American business groups campaigned to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and limit the federal taxation of income and wealth. Although their proposed upward‐redistributive policy would benefit few voters, it won the support of 31 state legislatures. To explain this outcome, this article offers a theory of strategic policy crafting by advocacy groups. Such groups may succeed even in otherwise unfavorable institutional environm…
Tax policy and tax protest in 20 rich democracies, 1980-2010
Why are some policies protested more than others? New data on protest against eight categories of taxation in twenty rich democracies from 1980 to 2010 reveal that economically and socially concentrated taxes are protested most, whereas taxes that confer entitlement to benefits are protested least. Other features of policy design often thought to affect the salience or visibility of costs are unimportant for explaining the frequency of protest. T…
Do Living Wage Policies Diffuse
This research note examines the conditions under which large U.S. cities pass living wage laws. It updates the only published article on the subject with new data and improved analytic methods. First, it shows that poverty, privatization, and the density of community organizations are associated with policy passage. Second, it provides new quantitative evidence that the living wage movement is, in part, a diffusion process associated with nationa…
Property Tax Limitation and Racial Inequality in Effective Tax Rates
In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of …
Policy Design and the Politics of City Revenue: Evidence from California Municipal Ballot Measures
Residents of the United States rely on municipal governments to deliver important public goods but are often reluctant to pay for those goods. Can tax policy design affect voters’ propensity to say yes to local taxes? We answer this question by analyzing a new database of 929 tax increases of heterogeneous design that were proposed to California voters from 1996 to 2010. We find that voters’ willingness to raise a municipal tax varies with the ch…
Does School Finance Litigation Cause Taxpayer Revolt?Serranoand Proposition 13
An influential theory argues that court-ordered school finance equalization undermines support for public schools. Residents of wealthy school districts who cannot keep their tax revenues for their own school districts may vote to limit school funding altogether. Proponents of this theory point toSerrano v. Priest, a 1977 decision of the California Supreme Court that mandated equalization of school financing and was followed almost immediately by…
Fiscal protest in thirteen welfare states
Why does the fiscal burden of the welfare state inspire more protest in some societies than others? Quantitative analysis of fiscal protest in 13 European countries from 1980 to 1995, combined with in-depth comparative-historical analysis of selected countries, shows that fiscal protest was most prevalent where there was a poor fit between tax policy and social spending commitments. Policy incoherence produced pressure for fiscal reforms, which i…
Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged
Broken Cities: Inside the Global Housing Crisis
What Makes a Tax Policy Popular? Predicting Referendum Votes from Policy Text
What kinds of taxation are most politically sustainable in a democracy? The authors answer this question by applying natural language processing and machine learning techniques to a large, new corpus of digitized documents describing municipal tax policies of heterogeneous design that have been directly subjected to popular referendum in the state of California. The authors find that tax policies of different description vary systematically in th…
Racial Context and Political Support for California School Taxes
Objective To determine how racial context influences school districts’ ability to raise taxes and whether it is mitigated by racial context. Method Panel regression models are fit to a data set of 293 parcel tax measures and 967 California school districts from 1997 to 2010, including data on the racial composition of enrolled students, the district population, and the school board, with controls for features of the policy and the social, politic…
New Sociology of Housing
Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections
Local taxation produces consequential resource inequalities among public school districts, but little is known about how policy design affects taxpayers’ willingness to pay for schooling. We show that voters are more likely to approve local school taxes if the policy is written to require citizen–state consultation on how the funds are spent. In a sample of 236 California school district elections, the promise of indirect consultation with a citi…
Reading The Great Transformation
Reading the Great Transformation The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 (orig. 1944). The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014. 296 pp. Isaac William Martin University of California – San Diego [email protected] Theory Economic Sociology Political Sociolog…
Old-World Tea Parties
The Social Origins of the Texas Tax Club Movement, 1924–1925
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Taxation, the State and Society: The Fiscal Sociology of Interventionist Democracy
To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
Rethinking Welfare Reform
Dawn of the Living Wage: The Diffusion of a Redistributive Municipal Policy
From 1994 to 1999, 22 large American cities passed “living wage” laws that mandate wages above poverty for certain workers in the private sector. The author argues that political conditions, rather than economic conditions such as urban poverty, best explain the emergence and success of the living wage movement. Quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that living wage policies result from the interaction of national progressive networks with …
Do Living Wage Policies Diffuse
This research note examines the conditions under which large U.S. cities pass living wage laws. It updates the only published article on the subject with new data and improved analytic methods. First, it shows that poverty, privatization, and the density of community organizations are associated with policy passage. Second, it provides new quantitative evidence that the living wage movement is, in part, a diffusion process associated with nationa…
Does School Finance Litigation Cause Taxpayer Revolt?Serranoand Proposition 13
An influential theory argues that court-ordered school finance equalization undermines support for public schools. Residents of wealthy school districts who cannot keep their tax revenues for their own school districts may vote to limit school funding altogether. Proponents of this theory point toSerrano v. Priest, a 1977 decision of the California Supreme Court that mandated equalization of school financing and was followed almost immediately by…
The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics
Rethinking Welfare Reform
To the Editor
Redistributing toward the Rich: Strategic Policy Crafting in the Campaign to Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, 1938-1958
Beginning in 1938, some American business groups campaigned to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and limit the federal taxation of income and wealth. Although their proposed upward‐redistributive policy would benefit few voters, it won the support of 31 state legislatures. To explain this outcome, this article offers a theory of strategic policy crafting by advocacy groups. Such groups may succeed even in otherwise unfavorable institutional environm…
To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
What We Talk About When We Talk About Taxes
Taxes are a preeminent issue in domestic politics, but the prevalence, content, and shape of public discussion on taxation is often perplexing to social researchers. We argue that part of the confusion arises from the lack of qualitative data on the meanings Americans associate with taxation. In order to remedy this lack we conducted semi-structured interviews with white, Southern, small business owners. In answering our questions, our respondent…
Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent
For anyone wanting to understand the anti-tax activists of today, including notable defenders of wealth inequality like the Koch brothers, the historical account in Rich People's Movements is an essential guide
The Social Origins of the Texas Tax Club Movement, 1924–1925
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Fiscal protest in thirteen welfare states
Why does the fiscal burden of the welfare state inspire more protest in some societies than others? Quantitative analysis of fiscal protest in 13 European countries from 1980 to 1995, combined with in-depth comparative-historical analysis of selected countries, shows that fiscal protest was most prevalent where there was a poor fit between tax policy and social spending commitments. Policy incoherence produced pressure for fiscal reforms, which i…
Taxation, the State and Society: The Fiscal Sociology of Interventionist Democracy
Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged
Does inequality erode social trust? Results from multilevel models of US states and counties
Old-World Tea Parties
Wenkai He. Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China
The fiscal breakdown of Qing China, which opened the way for the Chinese revolution of 1911, was surely one of the most important events of the twentieth century. But why was the Qing state vulnerable to fiscal breakdown? It had a productive system of land taxes and excises. Responsibility for assessing and collecting taxes was in the hands of salaried bureaucrats who were selected by competitive examination and subject to rigorous bookkeeping re…
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
Reading The Great Transformation
Reading the Great Transformation The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 (orig. 1944). The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014. 296 pp. Isaac William Martin University of California – San Diego [email protected] Theory Economic Sociology Political Sociolog…
Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe
New Sociology of Housing
Property Tax Limitation and Racial Inequality in Effective Tax Rates
In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of …
Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections
Local taxation produces consequential resource inequalities among public school districts, but little is known about how policy design affects taxpayers’ willingness to pay for schooling. We show that voters are more likely to approve local school taxes if the policy is written to require citizen–state consultation on how the funds are spent. In a sample of 236 California school district elections, the promise of indirect consultation with a citi…
Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement
Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as a justification for state laws that limit the increase of residential property taxes. We test the hypotheses that gentrification directly displaces homeowners by increasing their property taxes, and that property tax limitation protects residen…
Economics (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Politics (12 works) · Public economics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (8 works) · Taxation and Compliance Studies (8 works)