2001 IDRF Fellow Scott Gehlbach’s Representation Through Taxation challenges the conventional wisdom that politicians favor groups that are organized over those that are not. Gehlbach uses the postcommunist experience to challenge the traditional emphasis on collective action, focusing instead on the incentive of politicians to promote sectors that are relatively easy to tax, regardless of their organization. Emphasizing that there are limits to what organized interests can credibly promise in return for favorable treatment, Gehlbach shows that politicians may instead give preference to groups – organized or not – that happen to take actions that are politically valuable simply by their nature. In the former Soviet Union, tax systems were structured around familiar revenue sources, magnifying this incentive and helping to prejudice policy against new private enterprise. In Eastern Europe, in contrast, tax systems were created to cast the revenue net more widely, encouraging politicians to provide the collective goods necessary for new firms to flourish. Buy from Amazon