Ümit Öztürk: Social Lives of Fiscal Institutions: The Case of Associations

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A large segment of research in the fields of economics, political science, and sociology has been devoted to addressing an apparently simple but empirically and theoretically challenging question: “How should we tax the rich?” At its very core, the question operates on the assumption that governments can deploy fiscal tools to effect intended social and economic outcomes such as decreased wealth and income inequality. However, in reality, determining the exact consequences of such fiscal policies is challenging due to other variables such as diverse types of actors, their competing visions, mental models, interests, and decision-making mechanisms, among many others. 

To go beyond the limits of traditional studies of historical public finances and understand why and how similar fiscal apparatuses lead to divergent outcomes, the “new fiscal sociology” has been pushing us toward a broad conceptualization of fiscality as a bundle of social, and economic relations that can pervade the larger cross-sections of the societies. Inspired by the recent work on fiscal, institutional and relational sociology, my dissertation investigates the social lives of fiscal institutions, examining the forms, causes, and consequences of institutional transformations in the distinct fiscal regimes of Athens and Egypt, roughly between the sixth and second centuries BCE, to better understand the processes of institutional and organizational change. 

Departing from the traditional approaches focusing merely on the role of states and rulers as the only relevant agents, I opt for a network approach and decompose the larger networks of public finances into individual components, examining the social clusters that experiment with fiscal tools at different scales – from small private associations of a handful individuals to large-scale public organizations of hundreds or thousands –, and querying what fiscal arrangements were made in achieving what ends. Once individual components are analyzed, I aim to re-assemble the nodes of the public finance networks in order to offer a better understanding of institutional and organizational change. Nevertheless, while studying the institutional and organizational change at the level of the state is relatively easier thanks to the relatively abundant survival of documentary sources, the real challenge of my dissertation derives from its novel approach in incorporating the fiscal and organizational transformations experienced at the level of both public and private associations which left behind highly scattered documentary sources.

To overcome this challenge, I collaborated with another Stanford PhD student, James Macksoud (Classics) to build a historical database that will allow more robust analyses over a millennium, from the sixth century BCE to the fifth century CE. The historical data for this project come primarily from the Inventory of the Ancient Associations and the Ghent Database of Roman Guildes, covering a large geography ranging from Italy in the West to the further reaches of the Near East. These records, however, are organized in traditional index-card format to facilitate qualitative research, hence not amenable to any analytical, geospatial, or statistical analysis. Therefore, the first phase of the project focused on revising and re-coding the data collated from different databases to achieve more consistency, locating the points of data scarcity, creating additional variables for statistical and network analysis, and adding GIS information for spatial analysis (fig.1).

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Thanks to the financial support of the Europe Center, the project was able to recruit an undergraduate research assistant at CESTA over the summer and made significant progress in finalizing the first phase. At its current form, the database incorporated 2246 private associations with around %90 of the entries completed. To tackle the caveats of data scarcity and minimize the information loss while re-coding, every entry records over 100 binary or categorical attributes pertaining to the associations’ rules and regulations, fiscal and economic practices, collective activities, interactions with the larger society, as well as demographic compositions, among others – each of which can then be used to identify certain trends and correlations among the ancient associations. 

As part of my preliminary analysis, the data allowed for a systematic treatment of the revenue composition of ancient associations as an index for the comparative study of associations. Although preliminary, this index already illustrates some commonalities across different periods and geographies, and it suggests some causal patterns behind the fiscal preferences as well as the outcomes thereof. Second, the dataset enabled a study of the organizational structure and complexity of the associations at the macro level for the first time (fig.2). To facilitate this line of research, I developed a co-occurrence matrix of all the officers attested in the dataset and transformed it into a network model to examine the observable co-occurrences that would be the signs of shared organizational schemas (fig.3). 

While the popularity of hiereus (priest) in associations confirms the importance of religious practice for associations across centuries, other popular officers such as grammateus (secretary), epimeletes (supervisor), and tamias (treasurer) suggest shared organizational structure and administrative language.

The size and color of each node reflect the frequency of each officer title in the database, whereas each link (unweighted) between nodes represents at least one coexistence of two officers in an association. Overall network layout therefore provides a preliminary view illustrating which officer positions hold more centrality or function as bridging ties.

Once we finalize the data entry stage in the near future, a revision process will follow and entail collaboration with various scholars to examine our data. The final version of the database will give us a chance to run macro-scale analyses and answer big questions with respect to the institutional and organizational features of the ancient private associations. In particular, it will help me trace the institutional and organizational transformations of fiscal practices at macro and meso levels of analysis and understand the factors that correlate with the set of decisions private associations in the ancient Mediterranean made about their organizations. Therefore, I am greatly indebted to the Europe Center for the generous support that helped us accomplish such progress over the summer.