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Tax compliance has been studied in economics by analysing the individual decision of a representative person between paying and evading taxes. A neglected aspect of tax compliance is the interaction of taxpayers and tax authorities. The relationship between the two actors can be understood as an implicit or 'psychological' contract. Studies on tax evasion in Switzerland show that the more strongly the political participation rights are developed, the more important the contract is, and the higher tax morale is. In this paper, empirical evidence based on a survey of tax authorities of the twenty-six Swiss states (cantons) is presented, indicating that the differences in the treatment of taxpayers by tax authorities can be explained by differences in political participation rights as well.

Combining economic, social-psychological and sociological approaches to trust, this book provides a general theoretical framework to causally explain conditional and unconditional trust; it also presents an experimental test of the corresponding integrative model and its predictions. Broadly, it aims at advancing a cognitive turn in trust research by highlighting the importance of (1) an actor's context-dependent definition of the situation and (2) the flexible and dynamic degree of rationality involved. In essence, trust is as "multi-faceted" as there are cognitive routes that take us to the choice of a trusting act. Therefore, variable rationality has to be incorporated as an orthogonal dimension to the typological space of trust. The theory presents an analytically tractable model; the empirical test combines trust games, high- and low-incentive conditions, framing manipulations, and psychometric measurements, and is complemented by decision-time analyses.