Biometric State: Citizen Response to State Intervention in Uganda

• In Event: Inclusion and Control: Identity Documentation in the Global South

Abstract

Investments in the state’s informational capacities represent mixed news for citizens: they facilitate both the state’s ability to extract and surveil, as well as its ability to supply welfare-enhancing goods and services. Understanding how citizens interpret these ambiguous signals, and update their attitudes towards the state, then informs the extent to which limited state capacity constitutes a “demand-side” problem. I study the intensive rollout of biometric identification technology by the Ugandan government in 2014-15, when the army coercively enrolled nearly the entire adult population within six months. To isolate how citizens’ beliefs were affected, I leverage the fortuitous timing of a social survey enumerated mid-rollout. I find that citizens strikingly update their perceptions of the state’s authority, which is driven by their future economic welfare expectations rather than by their perceptions of the state’s ability to monitor. Over time, citizens’ heightened expectations are unmet by the ex post policy implications of the scheme. The broad-based effects across subgroups, along with correlational cross-national evidence, point to the wider generalizability of the effects. The results suggest how citizens’ expectations of future welfare provision, along with states’ sensitivity to these expectations, acts as an important potential constraint on states’ decisions to invest in technologies to render their citizens legible.

Author

• Jeremy Bowles, Stanford University