2026 Theses Doctoral

Counting on the State: Legibility, Insecurity, and Trust in Postcolonial Africa

Christensen, Aaron Jay

States need information about their publics for resource extraction, policy implementation, and legal enforcement. When states have limited coercive power, however, they depend on voluntary compliance and information from their populations. Mistrust of the state and fear of expropriation or persecution lead people to make themselves "illegible." At the same time, the state can provide valuable public services and property rights protections that often outweigh the perceived risks of a strong state. With limited fiscal and enforcement capacity, states must narrow the scope of services they provide, entrenching a low-tax, low-service equilibrium. Given the state's potential as both protector and predator, when do citizens make themselves legible to the state?

My dissertation consists of a series of standalone papers that advance a common argument: legibility—the extent of information available to the state—is the outcome of strategic behavior by states and citizens alike. In weak-state environments with little tradition of mass compliance and limited top-down coercive capacity, state-society relations are foundational to the state's own capacity. For citizens, registering identity and property with the state brings both direct administrative costs and potential exposure to future persecution. Despite these risks, citizens choose to work within state institutions when they stand to benefit from access to public services and legal protection, especially in the absence of non-state authorities as an alternative source of protection. Insecurity can drive "demand" for the state and for public compliance, but only where states are available and trusted to provide protection. Weak states, for their part, face limits to the scope of their capacity when they depend on informal networks and personal ties for governance.

I develop this argument through postcolonial cases in North and West Africa, drawing on novel administrative and archival datasets, existing large-N surveys, and qualitative case analysis. The first chapter explains historical patterns of voluntary land tenure registration in postcolonial Tunisia. With funding from the American Political Science Association and the National Science Foundation, I processed Tunisian administrative text and constructed an original geospatial dataset of all private requests for land registration from 1956 to 1980. Drawing on the law and finance literature in economics, I argue that variation in registration rates reflects strategic decisions to balance property rights threats posed by both the state and private actors. Registration protects land from unscrupulous neighbors but offers little protection from the state itself. It was more likely, and occurred sooner, for land with long-term capital investments and for land with potentially ambiguous boundaries; conversely, it was delayed for properties adjacent to or owned by the state or by family members. Following an increase in state expropriation, requests for registration virtually ceased, as the state itself became the primary threat to property rights.

The second chapter turns from land registration to individual identity registration, a prerequisite for making claims on the state. Using evidence from Côte d'Ivoire, I argue that state discrimination reduces the legibility of disfavored communities through two channels: demand mechanisms, where mistrust discourages voluntary registration, and supply mechanisms, where the civil service is selectively inaccessible. I examine how inequalities in children's birth changed as the Côte d'Ivoire's civil war (2002–2011). Combining five household survey datasets collected before, during, and after the war with the 2014 census, I exploit temporal variation in both survey and birth year. I find significant changes in different communities' access to birth registration across the wartime line of control, which I trace to discrimination and exclusion during the war. The evidence supports both demand and supply-side mechanisms.

The third chapter returns to land documentation in contemporary Côte d'Ivoire. Although the government has encouraged land registration as a post-conflict peacebuilding strategy, most land in the country is held without any written documentation of land rights. Titling has progressed slowly since the civil war, with relatively little bottom-up demand, owing to the administrative costs of titling and the state's untested record. I argue that demand for land documentation can emerge from property rights insecurity, but only if landowners are able to access the state. Analyzing a World Bank household panel in a difference-in-differences design, I show that proximity to violence during the disputed 2020 election increased property insecurity and reduced communal land use. Violence has an overall null effect on documentation, but with considerable heterogeneity. Direct victimization by violence, though, appears to reduce the rate of documentation.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of statebuilding and reframes routine citizen-state interactions as a site of political behavior. Methodologically, I develop ways to study state capacity despite the data and inferential problems of incomplete observation, including novel text-as-geospatial-data methods. Beyond academia, my work informs international programs that promote land rights formalization for conflict mitigation. Interventions that aim to improve the effectiveness of government must consider public participation in and reception of their programs. Effective statebuilding requires public trust—trust that must be earned and maintained.