Alexander Leipold

Research Project

In his dissertation project, Leipold examines a particular variant of property conflicts: corporate tax legislation. The taxation of capital (in the form of corporations) is an important instrument to achieve distributive justice and thus also for establishing political equality. It is particularly prone to conflict because only a few individuals own businesses and the economic power that goes with them. Nevertheless, taxes on mobile capital in particular have been steadily reduced in recent decades. Tax increases for the wealthy and business owners evoke a high potential for protest. One example is the debate over inheritance taxation in Germany, in which "family businesses" effectively framed their case for tax exemptions as a form of ownership worth preserving. The dissertation project is designed as a longitudinal analysis of ten case studies. Individual statements made in policy debates and hearings in the German Bundestag are visualized utilizing Discourse Network Analysis to show actor participation. The resulting dataset comprises some 36,000 statements on tax reform proposals between 1965 and 2016. In addition to the empirical analysis, Leipold examines rival concepts of corporate taxation that have over time increasingly converged towards neoliberal beliefs. The project is supervised by Marion Reiser and Dieter Plehwe.