Factors determining fiscal culture in Türkiye: An empirical study

Fiscal culture can defined as the society's perceptions, attitudes and behavioral patterns towards fiscal events and instruments (public expenditures and services, taxation, budgeting, debt, fiscal policy, etc.). The totality of perceptions, attitudes and behavioral patterns a society has, constitutes the culture of that society. Therefore, fiscal culture is essential in revealing society's perspective on fiscal events and fiscal instruments. The study aims to identify the factors determining fiscal culture in Türkiye through a scale development study. The fact that there is no study in this context in the literature constituted the starting point of the research. The unique aspects of this study are that the concept of fiscal culture was defined for the first time in this study, the fiscal culture scale was developed and this scale will continue to contribute to the literature by being used in other studies. Within the scope of the research, 1750 people were surveyed in seven geographical regions across Türkiye. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis conducted to establish the theoretical knowledge in the research, the validity of a five-factor structure was determined. To verify the structure developed based on the theory from the exploratory factor analysis, it was subjected to first-level confirmatory factor analysis and second-level confirmatory factor analysis. As a result of the analyses, it was concluded that the goodness of fit values of the models was close to good appropriate values and acceptable. It was seen that the five-dimensional structure consisting of 25 items proposed in the scale was confirmed with the first and second-level measurement model and a valid and reliable scale was developed in which both models could be used. According to the findings of the second-level confirmatory factor analysis, the most important factors determining fiscal culture in Türkiye are public expenditure culture and tax administration culture. Tax culture, government debt culture and fiscal awareness are other factors that have statistically significant effect in forming fiscal culture.