Political Exclusion, Ethnicity, and Uneven Access to Civil Registration

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

Abstract

Although we often think of undocumented persons as migrants or non-citizens, globally one in seven people have not had their birth registered, and thus do not possess official documents to prove their legal identity. The share of people who hold identity documents, but whose documents are deemed insufficient or inconclusive to prove citizenship, is even higher. The promise of equal citizenship is rendered hollow when large numbers of citizens do not have access to state-recognized identity documents, and are unable to effectively exercise the rights that citizenship grants them. If coverage of civil registration is uneven, who is left out? Previous research on the quality of civil registries has emphasized the importance of country-level administrative capacity, and household-level social marginalization. Mostly in isolation from this body of scholarship, a wealth of case studies documents the role of political marginalization, and in particular the barriers faced by members of minoritized or racialized groups when seeking documents from the state. Building on both of these literatures, this paper provides a cross-national perspective on how the political status of ethnic groups shapes access to civil registration. The paper draws on an original dataset linking ethnic groups identified in the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset to groups identified in household surveys, specifically the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS). Analyzing caregiver reported birth registration across 55 countries, the analysis demonstrates that children born in households that belong to politically excluded ethnic groups are less likely to possess birth certificates, even when controlling for socio-economic variables and other previously identified risk factors. The findings indicate that states leverage civil registration to strategically include or exclude societal groups, and thus speak to the role of identity documents as tools for `member-making’.

Author

• Imke Harbers, University of Amsterdam