Registering Voters, Creating New Citizens: The Partisan Determinants of Vital Record Improvement in Mexico

Since information is widely seen as a pre-requisite for effective public good provision, empirical research on the state’s “information capacity” (Brambor et al 2016) has flourished in recent years. A number of indicators have been proposed to capture whether states are able to collect and process large amounts of information, and whether the quality of information about territory and society is affected by systematic blind spots. One reason why populations often remain ‘illegible’ to states is that vital records, particularly birth and death registration, are incomplete. Yet, the reasons why the quality and coverage of vital records is uneven across societal groups and geographic units remain poorly understood. Recent scholarship suggests that the level of development and access to technology are insufficient to explain cross-country variation, but that states are willing to make costly investments in improving vital registration when illegibility undermines the implementation of core state projects (e.g. Setel et al. 2007; Hunter and Brill 2016). This paper explores another explanation for improvements in vital records: incentives of political parties to ensure that their supporters are ‘legible’ and appear on voter rolls in the wake of democratization reforms. Empirically, the paper examines the determinants of delayed birth registration, that is the factors that influence the issuance of birth certificates to adults for the first time in their lives. It analyzes subnational variation in delayed registration across Mexico, a country that has expanded access to registration over the last two decades. Drawing on an original dataset of 80 million births registered between 1985 and 2014, the paper shows how parties’ desire to get core supporters onto the voter rolls created incentives for the first-time registration of adults.