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.
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