Registering Voters, Creating Citizens: Vital Record Improvement in Mexico

• In Event: The Politics of Identity Documents in the Global South

Abstract

Since information is widely seen as a pre-requisite for effective public good provision, empirical research on the state’s “information capacity” (Brambor et al 2016) has flourished in recent years. A number of indicators have been proposed to capture whether states are able to collect and process large amounts of information, and whether the quality of information about territory and society is affected by systematic blind spots. One reason why populations often remain ‘illegible’ to states is that vital records, particularly birth and death registration, are incomplete. Yet, the reasons why the quality and coverage of vital records is uneven across societal groups and geographic units remain poorly understood. Recent scholarship suggests that the level of development and access to technology are insufficient to explain cross-country variation, but that states are willing to make costly investments in improving vital registration when illegibility undermines the implementation of core state projects (e.g. Setel et al. 2007; Hunter and Brill 2016). This paper explores another explanation for improvements in vital records: incentives of political parties to ensure that their supporters are ‘legible’ and appear on voter rolls in the wake of democratization reforms.

Author

• Imke Harbers, University of Amsterdam