The community charge has been described as the flagship of Thatcherism. It was also the issue which, together with Europe, brought the Prime Minister's voyage to an end and set her adrift as a political Captain Bligh whilst her parliamentary and cabinet crew sailed on without her. But though the prospect of English electoral disaster was the most immediate and obvious political effect of the new tax, its introduction a year earlier in Scotland had other and possibly longer-lasting consequences.

One of the most striking features of British general election results is the large variation in turnout across constituencies. In 1983, for instance, the mean turnout was 72.6 per cent of the registered electorate but it ranged from 82.1 per cent in Carmarthen to 51.8 per cent in the City of London and Westminster. Moreover, these variations tend to be reproduced in successive elections – the bivariate correlation between constituency turnout in the 1983 and 1987 elections for all 633 mainland Britain constituencies is +0.94.

This study examines the effect of incorporating taxation into the incumbency voting model using aggregate economic data for Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 1988. Although Canadian election campaigns tend to be dominated by economic performance issues, taxation, as measured by open-ended questions in the national election studies, has not been a salient campaign issue among voters. None the less, voters as consumers in the market economy have an interest in government policies that affect after-tax income. Furthermore, as economic citizens, voters have an interest in taxation as a measure of government efficiency – the costs of providing public services – independent of benefits generated by government. Paralleling American and British results, the economic and fiscal performance variables behave as expected in the incumbency model. Income change has a positive effect, and the rate of inflation and unemployment a negative effect, on incumbency voting. The relationship between taxation and incumbency voting is negative, both through its effect on after-tax income and also directly, independent of income. The results are consistent with an interpretation which suggests that voters, responding to the public agenda for economic performance and to a private agenda for taxation, behave both as politic consumers and as economic citizens.