Taxes do more than move money—they shape who people feel connected to, who they see as deserving, and what they believe counts as fair contribution. This research examines how the flow of taxes, benefits, and government spending actually reshapes social relationships in the UK and Sweden, drawing on earlier fieldwork in the global south. The problem it addresses is that most public and policy debates treat fiscal policy as a purely technical matter of resource allocation, ignoring how people experience inclusion, value, and sharing through these systems. If successful, the project will generate qualitative evidence showing how different welfare and tax choices affect people’s understanding of wealth production, labour, and mutual obligation. This could inform how governments design and communicate redistributive policies—not just to make them more efficient, but to make them more socially coherent. The work is fundamentally about understanding the social fabric that fiscal flows create or fray. It does not promise a new policy tool or diagnostic, but it aims to democratise fiscal conversations by grounding them in how people actually live with and through tax and welfare systems.
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The initial phase the project provided an actor-centred perspective on the sociality of tax, with the aim of re-shaping academic and popular understandings of what taxes are and do. The extension of the project will continue to pay attention to the social relationships constituted by tax and develop a further focus on fiscal flows (including benefits, government spending, and subsidies) and the social impact of contemporary redistributive projects, with an emphasis on northern Europe in the context of uncertain times. It does this whilst remaining in conversation with the archival and ethnographic data pertaining to the global south, collected during the initial phase. The renewal phase aims to achieve evidence-based understanding of how fiscal flows shape social relationships in the identified fieldsites in the UK and Sweden, generating qualitative data on the impacts of the politics of welfare on people’s understanding of wealth production, labour, and sharing. The work will advance current understandings of welfare politics and the effects of different tax choices on social relations. The contemporary moment is one of crisis, with global financial flows in flux and national budgets under scrutiny. This research highlights that what is at stake in these times of fiscal change is not simply the allocation of resources, but peoples’ experiences and views of inclusion, value and wealth creation, contribution, sharing, and how resources move through society. The project will contribute to academic and public debates about the contemporary welfare state and intervene in public and policy debates around taxes, redistribution, and inequality. Its ongoing aim is to democratise fiscal conversations.
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