The Commissioner vs the states: responsiveness and responsibility in European tax governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The European Union is the only international organisation that has a parliament where taxation is debated and legislated on. Along with foreign affairs and defense, however, taxation is also one of the few policy areas that is subject to unanimity voting among member-states. This creates a responsiveness-responsibility dilemma that the European Commission has tried to navigate by constructing responsiveness to public demands for tax justice as a political imperative. In this article, I apply the concept of ‘political work' to analyse EU tax policy between 2014 and 2019 and show the ways in which the politics of responsiveness partly eroded the institutional constraints of responsibility vis-à-vis member states. As I document, the Commission’s political work was initially successful but then lost momentum, as a handful of governments managed to veto efforts in the Council and push the issue to the OECD, where it was stalled by the United States until the election of Joe Biden.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".