“Fiscal Citizenship” from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Opportunities and Risks of Researching across Disciplines

Collaboration between tax scholars from various disciplines is increasingly popular and many research groups are adhering to this type of research. Yet it is not clear what the actual collaboration consists of. This article explores the endeavours of an international research group consisting of scholars from various disciplines to define, research and analyse the concept of “fiscal citizenship”. The authors use this example to shed light on what a collaboration between various disciplines can offer to tax research. The array of examples across disciplines illustrates the challenges and possibilities but also the limits of such a collaboration. A preliminary conclusion is that it is important not to blend methods. To conduct and apply different methods across disciplines may instead provide a relay of research tasks. In this project, the results from roundtable discussions in combination with the development of an ambitious concept tree helped articulate relevant questions for the comparative quantitative survey. Survey results can in turn be used in in-depth interviews for fleshing out issues that could not be explained by statistical inferences. As a concluding statement, it cannot be underlined enough the importance of continuously keeping an open mind to what “other” research concludes and proposes.