Abstract

The so-called Cultural Tightness–Looseness (CTL) concept intends to describe the socio-cultural foundation of societies by the strictness of social norms. In this paper, CTL is used to investigate its relevance to enforcing tax compliance. The CTL concept is formalised by structural payoff matrices for the confrontation between citizens and officials. Social norms and their impacts on the behaviour of the parties in a conflict are used to define several variants of tight and loose societies. The payoff matrices are employed to classify respective forms of societies. For a dynamic analysis, ‘power’ and ‘trust’, as policy measures of behaviour control, are introduced to determine which instrument or combination of instruments emerges as the most relevant and effective option in the respective societal setting. The result is that ‘trust’ emerges in tight societies as the more important instrument of behaviour control, whereas ‘power’ appears as the more crucial tool in loose societies. Therefore, it is concluded that power or the ‘cops and robbers’ approach is usually applied in loose societies to enforce tax compliance. By contrast, ‘trust’ via the provision of information and support for paying taxes can be more often used in tight societies.

摘要

所谓文化松紧（CTL）概念旨在通过社会规范的严格性来描述社会的社会文化基础。在本文中，CTL 用于调查其与执行税务合规性的相关性。CTL 概念通过公民与官员之间对抗的结构性收益矩阵形式化。社会规范及其对冲突各方行为的影响被用来定义紧密社会和松散社会的几种变体。收益矩阵用于对各种社会形式进行分类。为了进行动态分析，引入“权力”和“信任”作为行为控制的政策措施，以确定哪种工具或工具组合在各自的社会环境中成为最相关和最有效的选择。结果是，“信任”在紧密的社会中成为更重要的行为控制工具，而“权力”在松散的社会中则成为更重要的工具。因此，得出的结论是，在松散的社会中，通常采用权力或“警察和强盗”的方式来强制遵守税收规定。相比之下，通过提供信息和支持纳税来实现的“信任”在紧密的社会中可以更频繁地使用。