Taxes and Social Movements: a Bibliometric Analysis (1979― 2024)

This article presents an in-depth bibliometric analysis of the nexus of taxation and social movements in social science literature. The Web of Science database was used to collect articles published worldwide between 1979 and 2024. VOSViewer metrics were used to identify theoretical and methodological clusters. We conducted a comprehensive review of the articles in the resulting corpus (N = 62). The results point to an embryonic field both globally and for Latin America and Caribe, and in particular for Brazil. On the one hand, American social movement theory dominates the field, and the sociology of politics of climate change emerges in this epistemological field. On the other hand, the corpus presented a high diversity of methodological techniques (e.g., CDA, DNA, NPF, PCA, Q) and different themes (from local protests to ideological disputes and narratives of imaginaries between freedom and the welfare state; from tax policies on housing, migration, and urban mobility to carbon pricing policies within the framework of transnational corporate coalitions). Given that scholarship in the Global South has been scarce on the relationship between taxation and social movements, we conclude that there is room for new research agendas on this connection, which has been neglected by the social sciences.