Why do we see such strong backlashes against carbon taxes in rural areas? In this article, we focus on the role of perceptions in rural communities that the government unfairly advantages the urban centres of political and economic power. We argue that when people living in rural areas perceive of unequal treatment by the state, they are less supportive of carbon taxes, because they believe that carbon taxes unfairly punish those that have already been disadvantaged by the state. We carry out a survey with a representative sample of around 3000 respondents from the United Kingdom to test our argument. We provide observational and experimental evidence showing that for those living in rural areas, increased perceptions of unequal treatment by the state reduce the perceived fairness of carbon taxes and substantially lower support for carbon taxation. Our results suggest that tackling deep-rooted resentments around unequal treatment in rural areas is crucial for building broad public support for carbon taxation.

Do more rules improve overall policy performance? To answer this question, we look at rule growth in the area of environmental policy from an aggregate perspective. We argue that impactful growth in rules crucially depends on implementation capacities. If such capacities are limited, countries are at risk of ‘empty’ rule growth where they lack the ability to implement their ever‐growing stock of policies. Hence, rules are a necessary, yet not sufficient condition for achieving sectoral policy objectives. We underpin our argument with an analysis of the impact of a new, encompassing measure of environmental rule growth covering 13 countries from 1980 to 2010. These findings call for ‘sustainable statehood’ where the growth in rules should not outpace the expansion in administrative capacities.

The climate crisis looms but support for fuel taxation is low. How to boost support? The obvious way is to make the connection to the climate crisis explicit. Many observers fear, however, that policy myopia renders this strategy ineffective: As the consequences of the climate crisis are long‐term and insecure, people are loath to pay for costly countermeasures in the short term. We look at policy distraction as a second potential drag. We argue that climate crisis‐induced support for fuel taxation can also be undermined by other salient events which divert attention. To test our argument, we conduct a large‐scale survey experiment with more than 21,000 respondents in 17 European countries. Our results show that a simple climate crisis prime raises support for fuel taxation by 12 percentage points. The effect decreases but remains substantial when stressing the long time horizon of the climate crisis. It almost disappears when other current crises (COVID‐19 and Russian military aggression) are mentioned. Thus, distraction by concurrent events is a serious impediment to mobilising support for fuel taxation.

How does tax regressivity at the top affect public support for taxation? In this article, we run an information provision experiment in the United States with a quota-representative sample of around 4,000 people and randomly present respondents with factual information about total tax rates by income group. We find that informing respondents that the superrich pay lower total tax rates than other people not only increases support for raising taxes on the rich but also lowers support for taxing the middle class. Our results highlight an important hidden cost of tax regressivity at the top: if left unaddressed, it risks undermining public support for broad-based taxation.

Has the financial crisis influenced taxes on the rich? In this article, I argue that crisis countries have raised income tax progressivity because of fiscal fairness considerations. I test this claim by analysing a new data set on top marginal personal income tax (PIT) rates for 122 countries from 2006 to 2014, applying matching methods and a difference-in-differences design. The results show that countries with a financial crisis have increased top PIT rates by 4 percentage points. Furthermore, rising public debt only leads to higher top PIT rates when it is crisis-induced. These findings demonstrate that notions of fiscal fairness can still shape progressive taxation in the 21st century.

Progressive taxation is an effective redistributive tool in times of growing inequality. However, like all public policies, an increase in tax progressivity is unlikely if it lacks popular demand. Has the financial crisis affected the demand for progressive taxation? Building on research that has identified fairness beliefs as the main factor pushing for taxes on the rich, I argue that the Great Recession and states’ reactions to it have caused a general shift in tax policy preferences. As a consequence, demand for tax progressivity is higher in crisis countries. Multilevel analyses using survey data for 32 countries show support for my argument. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the politics of redistribution in the 21st century.