The politics of state supply

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In war-to-peace transitions, people and states face incentives to rebuild the social contract, partly by increasing the population's legibility to the state. However, war-time violence and post-conflict uncertainty distribute these incentives unevenly. To understand key trade-offs in seeking out legal identity, we explore the conditions under which individuals obtain civil documentation in post-conflict societies. We develop a simple conceptual framework including short-term costs, long-term trade-offs, and perceptions of the politics of the state's supply of civil documentation. Empirically, we combine a cross-national analysis of the predictors of legal identity gaps in post-conflict states with two conjoint experiments and descriptive data on actual legal identity from the case of Iraq. We find that material concerns and social group membership shape individual perceptions about legibility demand, while corruption considerations inform perceptions of supply.