Adrienne LeBas, Can Social Intermediaries Build the State? Taxation and Informal Governance in Lagos, Nigeria, 20.06.2024, 5pm-7pm CET

Sciences Po, room B.001, 1 place Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris & Zoom*

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Can Social Intermediaries Build the State? Taxation and Informal Governance in Lagos, Nigeria

In recent years, many low-income countries have attempted to formalize and extract tax revenue from their large informal economies. Why have these efforts so often failed? In this presentation, LeBas presents her book project with Jessica Gottlieb (University of Houston), which explores how taxes-for-services exchange — the central framework used in tax policy and research — may be complicated by the presence of strong, non-state institutions. Where states are weak, these social actors often provide services and extract revenue on their own, and they may also bargain with the state on behalf of citizens. LeBas and Gottlieb draw on over two years of fieldwork in Lagos, Nigeria, to determine whether weak states might “piggy back” on these strong and socially embedded social institutions in their attempts to expand their tax bases. The centerpiece of the book is a field experiment conducted in partnership with Lagos Internal Revenue Service and the Lagos Market Women and Men’s Association, but the authors also draw on qualitative research and original survey data. They show that strong social institutions are unlikely to serve as effective agents of state tax appeals, but these institutions may produce unexpected constituencies for formalization and fiscal exchange. The book presents a new theory of how individuals choose whether to engage with the state, which stresses the central importance of non-state institutions in structuring informal economies.

Speaker

Adrienne LeBas (PhD, Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Government at American University’s School of Public Affairs. Prior to joining AU, she taught at Michigan State University and was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include democratization, political violence, and taxation. She is the author of the award-winning From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011) and articles in the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals. In addition to the book project presented in this talk, LeBas is also writing a book on electoral violence and grassroots economies of violence provision. She is currently a visiting scholar at CERI, Sciences Po.

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