CID Speaker Series
The Taxes We Vote For
Isaac Martin
When
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
About the event
Abstract: “Many comparative scholars argue that voters in the United States tolerate comparatively little public spending, and correspondingly great levels of income inequality, because of unpopular design features of the US tax system. Few of these scholars agree on precisely which features of which taxes render them unpopular. I report a new analysis that identifies popular and unpopular policy features inductively by applying sentence transformer models and regularized regression to a corpus of 1,924 tax policy proposals of heterogeneous design that were subject to local referendum in California from 1986 to 2018. The result is a rich and interpretable archive of policy features that are associated with the willingness of people in a large and diverse democracy to pay for schools, healthcare, and policing.”
About the speaker
Join the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics as we host Isaac Martin, Jeri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Science in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California San Diego. Isaac will present, “The Taxes We Vote For.”
Isaac William Martin is the Jeri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Science in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California San Diego. From 2019 to 2025, he served as the founding Chair of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
He is the author of books and articles on such topics as housing policy, municipal taxation, and the political economy of inequality. His books include Foreclosed America (Stanford, 2015), with Christopher Niedt; Rich People’s Movements (Oxford, 2013); and The Permanent Tax Revolt (Stanford, 2008). He is editor of The New Handbook of Political Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), with Thomas Janoski, Cedric de Leon, and Joya Misra; The New Fiscal Sociology (Cambridge, 2009), with Ajay K. Mehrotra and Monica Prasad; and After the Tax Revolt (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2009), with Jack Citrin. His articles have been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Law and Society Review, Urban Affairs Review, and other journals. His research has been covered on NPR and in the New Yorker and the Washington Post. His books have won awards from the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the Social Science History Association.