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Replication Data for: Identification Politics: Information, Distribution, and the State in Sub-Saharan Africa

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Identification Politics: Information, Distribution, and the State in Sub-Saharan Africa
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F1PSVF
 
Creator Bowles, Jeremy
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description This package contains the datasets for the three papers in my dissertation. Please note that these datasets are likely out of date; please check my website or get in touch for up to date replication files as I develop the papers further.



Abstract: A distinguished literature in political science conceives of states as seeking to impose uniform control throughout their territories but being constrained by the high resource costs of doing so. As a result, the inability of many developing countries to evenly administer policy is often construed to be a problem of limited state capacity. This dissertation examines how distributive conflicts, created by the economically stratified effects of state-building schemes, undermine states’ efforts to expand their reach. It suggests that the challenge is not resource constraints, but rather a set of perverse and self-reinforcing political incentives which restrict the state’s uniform expansion. Substantively, I focus on the development of states’ informational capacities through citizen identification and registration schemes. Across a set of country cases and historical moments, I study how variation in what the state knows about its citizens affects who the state covers and how. First, drawing on evidence from Tanzania, I consider why we observe such enduring economic inequalities in citizens’ legibility to the state. Leveraging a targeted policy reform in the early post-independence period, novel causal estimates highlight the selective incentives faced by the rich to initially comply with the state’s informational demands. Second, drawing on evidence from Ghana, I study the challenge of disrupting this regressive status quo. Exploiting a discontinuity in the spatial assignment of identity registries, I demonstrate how the more even incidence of the state’s capacities risks exposing it to demands it struggles to meet. Third, in the context of modern Uganda, I consider how citizens interpret signals of the state’s expanding reach. Utilizing the fortuitous timing of a social survey administered during its intensive biometric identification rollout, I show how complex signals of capacity can raise citizens’ expectations of future service provision in ways which prompt disappointment and disillusionment ex post. Together, the dissertation underscores the political challenges posed by the distributive consequences of state-building processes. These consequences jar both with policy narratives regarding such modernizing initiatives and a broader academic literature on state-building that is often quiet on questions of distribution.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Bowles, Jeremy