ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the analysis of taxation in order to understand the ways in which the state is shaped and its capacity to reduce economic concentration of resources. To this end, the concept of tax culture is defined and empirically applied to the Chilean economic elite – an elite that is highly resilient to change and opposed to distributive reforms – using quantitative and qualitative evidence. The analysis is also contextualized within historical developments that include changes triggered by natural disasters, dictatorship, the return to democracy, and, more recently, the social uprising, the pandemic, and the creation of a convention to draft a new constitution. The results reveal a set of attitudes of rejection or resistance to paying taxes, and of criticism of fiscal financing and the sacrifice of individual freedom, behaviors exacerbated in the last decade by non-compliance and corruption that have increased institutional distrust. In addition to reflecting on the possibility of changing the economic elite's tax culture in the confluence of transformations that Chile is facing, the chapter concludes by discussing the usefulness of the notion of tax culture in thinking about the tax preferences of the elite and citizenry from a fiscal sociology perspective.
