SOCIOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF TAX EVASION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE ITALIAN CASE

How do people behave when their short-term interest of minimizing paying taxes contrasts with the long-term collective interest in ensuring sufficient tax payments to finance public goods? In this sit uation, individual decision-making is probably affected by factors beyond any material cost-benefit considerations, such as cultural, institutional, social, and normative influences. This doctoral thesis aimed to investigate the sociological drivers of individual tax evasion in Italy with a specific focus on the North-South divide. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, I developed a theoretical framework that integrated three classes of non-economic motivations for tax evasion: individual, in stitutional, and social. I argued that when deciding whether to comply with their taxes, people are motivated by their moral imperatives toward taxation (i.e., individual mechanism), their perception of institutional performance in terms of public goods provision (i.e., institutional mechanism), and their social norms of tax payment (i.e., social mechanism). I studied these mechanisms using three complementary methodologies on various Italian samples recruited online. In a survey, I measured the individual, institutional, and social mechanisms to investigate the roots of the North-South tax evasion gap in Italy. Then, to understand why Italians evade taxes so systematically, I studied the main drivers of tax evasion using two experiments where the institutional and social mechanisms were manipulated: a factorial survey, where I measured tax compliance intention given hypothetical scenarios, and a behavioural experiment, where I measured tax behaviour in an incentivised envi ronment that mimicked the tax system in Italy. Taken together, the results of the three empirical studies show that social norms are key to explain tax evasion in Italy. In other words, when deciding whether to pay their taxes, individuals are partially influenced by the institutional environment, and mostly by their own beliefs about others’ tax payment (i.e., empirical expectations) and their beliefs about the social acceptance of tax evasion (i.e., normative expectations).