In recent years, a growing number of scholars have bridged the literatures on public policy and social mobilization in order to study how and when “movements matter” (Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Although there is evidence that social movements can have an enduring impact on policy outcomes, most students of public policy tend to pay limited attention to such movements. In his book The Permanent Tax Revolt, Isaac Martin explores the policy and political impact of a social movement that emerged in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Known as the “tax revolt,” this movement reacted against the removal of traditional tax privileges put forward as part of the modernization and standardization of state property taxes throughout the post-war era. According to Martin, many citizens strongly resented the abolition of these traditional tax privileges because they had long protected them against market insecurity and instability. From this perspective, such privileges had something in common with modern social programs that also aimed at protecting citizens against market forces.

Although it emerged as an ideologically diverse movement, the state-level tax revolt culminated in 1978 with the adoption of Proposition 13, a conservative ballot initiative that imposed a property tax limitation in California. At the time, Martin argues, this conservative electoral success was interpreted as a strong message to the political elite that seemed especially stunning because it came from California, the largest and one of the most liberal states of the Union. Perhaps even more crucial, Proposition 13 was a popular ballot initiative, which increased its political significance. Rapidly after the adoption of Proposition 13, other states enacted this type of measure while more progressive alternatives to tax limits lost ground.

In Washington, federal politicians also reacted to Proposition 13, and Republicans began to depict themselves as strong tax-cut advocates. In 1980, apparently surfing on the Proposition 13 wave and the broader tax revolt movement, Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency and, the following year, he signed what remains the largest federal tax cut in the history of the United States. Remembering Proposition 13 and the early tax policy success of the Reagan era, US conservatives remain strong tax-cut advocates to this day, and the Republican Party as a whole has identified with the tax limitation agenda embedded in Proposition 13.

Placing the United States in comparative perspective, Martin argues that the permanent tax revolt that country has witnessed since the late 1970s is not the product of deeply rooted and uniquely American cultural beliefs but a contingent historical construction related to the timing of social mobilization and its interaction with partisan ideology, electoral strategies and political institutions. Comparing the United States to Britain, Denmark and France, the author suggests that tax revolts are not always conservative in nature, and that they tend to occur as a response to the elimination of tax privileges rather than as a knee-jerk reaction to increasing or objectively “excessive” tax burdens. For Martin, people in these various countries have sought to defend what they perceived as entitlements that protected them against economic insecurity. This analogy between traditional tax privileges and modern social programs like public pensions explains in part why the author draws extensively on the social policy literature, which he links to the scholarship on social movements in order to explain why tax modernization (or at least of threat of tax modernization) is the main source of tax revolt in advanced industrial democracies. Yet, as Martin shows, tax-related social and political mobilizations do not necessarily lead to the permanent tax revolt that has characterized US politics for the last three decades. Paradoxically, favourable to the wealthy, can this permanent, conservative tax revolt end anytime soon? Although the author states that sustainable progressive alternatives to across-the-board tax cuts are available, he also believes that the tax and spending limitations enacted at the state level have created vested interests that make them difficult for politicians to dismantle. But progressive change is possible at both the state and the federal levels and, according to Martin, the phasing out of the George W. Bush tax cuts are unlikely to trigger massive social protest, if this process takes place earlier rather than later. Over time, people get used to existing tax cuts, and the longer politicians wait to reverse them, the harder it becomes to move in a progressive direction.

The Permanent Tax Revolt is an engaging and superbly researched book that successfully draws on qualitative and quantitative data to back the author's claims about the origins and the consequences of tax revolts at the state and the federal level, as well as in other countries. The comparative and international material is well integrated to the narrative about the United States, and the book reads extremely well. Although this book is based on a PhD dissertation, it does not read like one. As far as the limitations are concerned, I have very few to report. For one, some readers could find the analogy between traditional tax privileges and modern social programs problematic, as these programs are standardized schemes grounded in a type of administrative logic that is at odds with tax privileges. Although this is obvious, the author could have stressed the institutional differences between tax privileges and social programs before explaining what they have in common. Furthermore, Martin's argument that tax modernization during wartime periods does not trigger tax revolts is well substantiated but more could have been said about the “negative cases” he identified (that is, countries where no tax revolt took place altogether). Despite these minor limitations, The Permanent Tax Revolt is a must read for social scientists interested in the politics of tax policy.