Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State Capacity

TLDR

Recent political science research has highlighted the state's role in reducing violence and fostering development, sparking intense interest in the foundations of state capacity. The article argues that state capacity depends on the state's legibility—its breadth and depth of knowledge about citizens—and that this legibility is essential for effective, centralized governance, while also outlining future research avenues using a novel legibility indicator. The authors illustrate legibility’s importance by linking it to the state's ability to curb free‑riding in collective action dilemmas and demonstrate this link through tax‑contribution data using a census‑based legibility measure. They show that the census‑derived legibility measure predicts tax contributions to public goods, supporting the argument that legibility facilitates state capacity.

Abstract

Recent research in political science has stressed the importance of the state in curbing violence and promoting social and economic development, resulting in an explosion of scholarly interest in the foundations of state capacity. This article argues that state capacity depends in part on "legibility"—the breadth and depth of the state's knowledge about its citizens and their activities—and that legibility is crucial to effective, centralized governance. We illustrate the importance of legibility through a novel argument linking legibility to the state's role in curbing free-riding in collective action dilemmas. We then demonstrate this argument in the context of tax contributions to public goods using an original measure of legibility based on national population censuses. The article concludes by discussing how future research may leverage our indicator's exceptional temporal and geographic coverage to advance new avenues of inquiry in the study of the state.