Information, Distribution, and the African State

• In Event: Strengthening States in Strong Societies: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Variation in the success of centralizing schemes intended to identify and register African citizens is significant and non-obvious. I argue that these interventions, by strengthening state-citizen informational linkages, limit the discretion and rent extraction of local intermediaries otherwise responsible for brokering access to public resources. They therefore seek to limit the expansion of such schemes or reallocate extraction towards groups that fail to comply. The result is a bifurcation: nominally universal state-building interventions, in weakly-institutionalized settings, render access to the state more programmatic for some but more clientelistic for others. I provide causal evidence for the argument leveraging a population-based discontinuity in the assignment of civil registries in Ghana in 1975. Combined with three decades of individual-level data, the results support that variation in the influence of local agents condition the distributional effects of such state-building investments. Additional empirical support is provided using panel data on the rollout of identity registries across a set of African states.

Author

• Jeremy Bowles, Stanford University