Several governments around the world have developed new ways of registering citizens when it comes to their relations with the state administration. Contemporary practices of identification through databases open up new ways of institutional and governmental practices across various sectors. In France, the tax administration had become the flagship of the whole French e-government project. The first case study focuses on the Copernicus project, which rapidly raised concerns about the implications of identification practices for taxpayers/citizens/households/individuals through unique identifiers. The Indian case study focuses on the National Register of Citizens as a citizen identification infrastructure, the processes of trying to categorise a diverse demography into citizens and non-citizens, and the subsequent issues that arise around different claims to citizenship. Taking these two case studies, this article discusses two national databases in France (tax administration) and India (citizenship), respectively, as examples of contemporary state practices around digital identification infrastructures as a form of database politics to enforce accountable forms of citizen practices through which different forms of data driven institutional and sociotechnical processes are marking new changes in the state–citizen relationship, both in France and in India.

在与国家行政部门的关系方面，世界上几个国家的政府已经开发出新的公民登记方法。通过数据库进行当代身份识别的实践为跨部门的制度和政府实践开辟了新途径。在法国，税收管理已成为整个法国电子政务项目的旗舰。第一个案例研究的重点是哥白尼项目，该项目迅速引起人们对于通过唯一标识符对纳税人/公民/家庭/个人的身份识别做法的影响的担忧。印度的案例研究着眼于作为公民身份识别基础设施的国家公民登记系统，试图将各种人口统计学分类为公民和非公民，以及随之而来的有关公民身份主张的问题。本文以这两个案例研究为例，分别讨论了法国（税收管理）和印度（公民身份）的两个国家数据库，作为围绕数字标识基础设施的当代国家实践的示例，该实践是一种数据库政治形式，旨在通过以下方式强制实施问责制公民行为：在法国和印度，不同形式的数据驱动的制度和社会技术过程正在标志着国家与公民关系的新变化。