The Politics of Climate Taxation

There is broad consensus about the need for an effective climate policy. Green taxation is seen as a key policy to combat climate chance. Framing such a policy is difficult, however. Other crises are always more urgent; green taxation is costly and has stark redistributive implications. Also, the policy is boundary-spanning and requires simultaneous action by different governments and at different levels of governance. Based on a series of survey experiments across the EU and in Germany, Laura Seelkopf discusses the drivers of support for (or opposition to) climate taxation.

Laura Seelkopf is Professor of International Comparative Public Policy at the Geschwister Scholl Institute for Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current research focuses on three main topics: the development of the modern tax state, support for green taxes, and gender discrimination in taxation.

Selected Publications
Genschel, Philipp, Hanna Lierse, and Laura Seelkopf. 2016. “Dictators Don’t Compete: Autocracy, Democracy, and Tax Competition.” Review of International Political Economy 23 (2): 290–315.

Seelkopf, Laura, and Peter Starke. 2019. “Social Policy by other Means: Theorizing Unconventional Forms of Welfare Production.” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 21 (3): 219–34.

Seelkopf, Laura, Moritz Bubek, Edgars Eihmanis, Joseph Ganderson, Julian Limberg, Youssef Mnaili, Paula Zuluaga, and Philipp Genschel. 2021. “The Rise of Modern Taxation: A New Comprehensive Dataset of Tax Introductions Worldwide.”The Review of International Organizations 16 (1): 239–63.