How do Political Philosophers approach the topic of Taxation?

When reading a new book Political Philosophy and Taxation, I became curious about how my fellow political philosophers would approach the topic. 

To test my assumptions about this I set up a poll - thanks to those who responded! 

I will set out the results below. 

Method 

I created an anonymous poll with two questions: 

1. What is your own preferred approach to the issue of taxation? [Multiple choice with an optional write-in option]
2. What do you think would be the dominant approach to taxation among political philosophers generally? [checkbox of the same options as the above, with a write-in option]

I thought asking these two questions was a good idea as each of these questions on their own might not have been informative and comparing the two might prove useful (it did).  

On reflection, perhaps I should have asked a third question to check what sort of level the respondent was working at, since the survey was open to anyone. 

I spread awareness of the poll in two ways:

• via a tweet. I didn't have that many followers (around 450), but I requested (begged) retweets from fellow political philosophers and some specialist publishers, academic centres and professional associations. I focused on accounts with a reasonable amount of followers (but not too many) who were likely to also be political philosophers.
  The tweet was retweeted by 20 account and received 6,000 'impressions.' Apparently over 100 clicked on the link via twitter which is a lot fewer than took the survey.   
• via the PHILOS-L email list. This is an email list for philosophers with 13,000 members. Many of these will be moral and political philosophers.
  The number of people taking the survey had a big rise after I posted on PHILOS-L and an even bigger rise (the most substantial) in the 24 hours after it was included in the digest.  

So while I did not limit or check submissions, I am reasonably confident that the responses were a fair representation of the profession. 

Results

I received 79 responses in 5 days, though one was blank so it says 78 below. 

Response to Q1

A third of the responses were for "Liberal Egalitarian/Contractualist (e.g. Rawls, Dworkin, Barry, Scanlon)"

Just behind was 30% who went for "Socialist/Marxist/Social democratic (e.g. Marx, Bernstein)"

15% went for Welfare-maximizing options, though they split with only 1/3 of those being on the economic right. 

10% gave economically right-leaning responses (classical liberal or libertarian) with a further 2% going for Conservative. 

5% went for the broad participatory communitarian or democratic common good option that I offered.

5% went for other radical options, including a write-in answer of 'anarchist' (which I assume must be left-wing anarchist given the anarcho-capitalist option offered)

Response to Q2

The response to the second question proved to be a useful check on the first, and also telling about what political philosophers think of their fellows. 

69% of the responses were for "Liberal Egalitarian/Contractualist (e.g. Rawls, Dworkin, Barry, Scanlon)." This is the approach that I take, and I assumed it would be the most common one. It is clearly considered the 'mainstream' approach by members of the profession.  

I didn't find any obvious patterns in comparing the way that individuals responded to q1 & q2 directly. 

Overall conclusions

As mentioned I undertook this for my own curiosity, but several people contacted me to express interest in the results and I can see why! 

The question is essentially 'how do political philosophers approach the topic of distributive justice.' 

It is very interesting for us to check the theoretical/political leanings of the profession and find out what others in the profession think about the leanings of the profession as well. 

The responses were roughly what I expected, with socialist/social democratic being more popular than I expected. There are of course many overlaps between the options. For instance, liberal egalitarianism can overlap somewhat with social democracy (particularly with regard to Rawls and Piketty). 

The responses prove my thesis that free market desert theories (0%) and libertarianism (1%) are very much outside the mainstream (I would say correctly so!). 

I would be happy to get your thoughts on these results in the comments below!