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Thesis Submitted to Fulfil Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Mobilisation for international tax justice after the financial crisis in the UK and Australia Michael Vaughan A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2019 i STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. A reworked version of Chapter 6 of this thesis has been published as a single author journal article: Vaughan, Michael (2019). Scale shift in international tax justice: comparing the UK and Australia from 2008 to 2016. Social Movement Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2019.1607283. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Michael Vaughan ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my supervisor Ariadne Vromen. I lucked out from the start with Ariadne's intellectual guidance and sincere interest. And as my luck on other fronts came and went over the thesis – as it does for everyone – I was grateful for her empathy and pragmatism. Whether or not I end up working in academia I have a model for what that looks like to me at its best: intellectual ambition without ego, and an aspiration to be useful to your community and decent to your colleagues. Thank you to the other people who have helped build a sense of academic camaraderie, especially my associate supervisor Ainsley Elbra and my main co- conspirators Jenna Price and Lucy Sunman. And of course family and friends who put up with me during the ups and downs. Thank you to the people who have supported me professionally along the way, whether employing me, co-authoring with me, or giving me other opportunities to participate in academic life: Darren Halpin, Shaun Ratcliff, James Dennis, Nina Hall, Fiona Martin, Anika Gauja and Stewart Jackson. Thank you also to the academic staff in the department who supported us PhD students as a cohort at various points, especially Susan Park, Megan Mackenzie and Rodney Smith. And thank you to the eagle-eyed Claire Struthers for proofreading the final draft. Finally, I am grateful for the tax justice campaigners who shared their time and views with such generosity. Even thinking through the challenges of writing a PhD, it is much easier to analyse change than to create change. I have a world of respect for the smarts, determination, and patience of the people I met over this research project. My biggest hope (along with the more selfish job of passing the examination process) is that the finished product can be of some use to them. iii ABSTRACT Over the decade following the financial crisis of 2008/2009, the salience of international tax justice issues such as multinational corporate tax avoidance has grown dramatically against a backdrop of financial instability and government austerity. One frequently underexamined factor in understanding international taxation is the involvement of civil society, which spans a diverse range of actors and repertoires, from experts in the Tax Justice Network disseminating policy proposals to activists in UK Uncut occupying Vodafone stores. Although there has been formative research into some organisations involved in tax justice advocacy, their relationships with one another have received less scholarly attention. This thesis provides a comparative case study of tax justice advocacy in Australia and the UK after the financial crisis, giving further insight into movement- level dynamics in the context of respectively low and high mobilisation environments. A mixed methods approach combines three primary sources of data: in-depth interviews with 35 key organisational actors across the two countries; an original hand-coded dataset of 909 articles from five national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2017, analysed using a political claims analysis approach; and a social media dataset scraped from the public Facebook pages of these core organisations, analysed using natural language processing and network analysis methods. This thesis argues that tax justice advocacy after the financial crisis is neither a disparate collection of contentious acts nor an undifferentiated transnational network. Instead, contention is primarily structured as interconnected national- level networks, which achieve particular intensity in response to austerity. Given that civil society engagement with international taxation is widely perceived as a counterweight to the concentrated influence of corporate actors, these findings offer a roadmap for future civil society advocacy, which directs attention toward inter- sectoral cooperation around the national implications of international tax policy. Supervised by Professor Ariadne Vromen, with associate supervisor Ainsley Elbra iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Statement of originality ......................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................................iii Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... iv List of tables ........................................................................................................................................... viii List of figures ............................................................................................................................................ ix Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Research question ..................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter outlines ......................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Theorising dynamics of contention ......................................................................... 15 Social movements using DOC ............................................................................................. 15 DOC as synthesis ....................................................................................................... 16 DOC as innovation .................................................................................................... 21 The critical reception of DOC ............................................................................... 24 Why DOC here and now? ....................................................................................... 26 Chapter 3: Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 31 The logic of paired comparison between the UK and Australia ........................... 31 The use of mixed methods .................................................................................................. 35 Bourdieusian analysis using interview data in Chapter 5 ....................... 36 Data collection ............................................................................................. 37 Thematic coding ......................................................................................... 38 Political Claims Analysis using newspaper data in Chapters 6.............. 39 Data collection ............................................................................................. 41 Conducting PCA .......................................................................................... 42 Network analysis using news and organisational data in Chapter 7 .............................................................................................................. 43 Data collection ............................................................................................. 44 Network visualisation and statistical analysis ............................... 46 Natural Language Processing using Facebook data in Chapter 8 ......... 47 Data collection ............................................................................................. 47 Discourse network .................................................................................... 48 Named Entity Recognition ..................................................................... 53 Bringing different methods and data together ........................................................... 54 Chapter 4: The case study of international tax justice ........................................................... 57 v What is tax justice? ................................................................................................................. 57 The financial crisis as a pivotal event ............................................................................. 61 The literature on contention around international tax justice ............................ 65 Defining the tax justice movement .................................................................................. 68 Chapter 5: Actor constitution ........................................................................................................... 85 Crisis and symbolic power .................................................................................................
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