1st Edition
The Global Politics of Census Taking Quantifying Populations, Institutional Autonomy, Innovation
This book examines in detail the state of the art on census taking to spark a more vivid debate on what some may see as a rather technical – and hence uncontroversial – field of inquiry.
Against the backdrop of controversy between instrumental and performative theoretical stances towards census taking, it analyses the historical trajectories and political implications of seemingly technical decisions made during the quantification process by focusing on the 2020 round of censuses, which have been particularly revealing as activities have been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing containment policies. Through case studies of countries from the Global North and the Global South, the book highlights the consequences of, and innovations and challenges in census taking focusing on three particular areas of concern – the politics of the census in terms of identity politics; the institutional autonomy of the census; and significant and transformative methodological innovations.
This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of quantification studies, and social demography and more broadly to public policy, governance, comparative politics and the broader social sciences.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution‑Non Commercial‑No Derivatives (CC‑BY‑NC‑ND) 4.0 license.
The Global Politics of Census Taking in the 2020 Census Round: An introduction
Walter Bartl, Alberto Veira-Ramos and Christian Suter
I. The Politics of Ethnoracial Categories
1. An Avalanche of Ethnoracial Population Data: On the Productive Politics of Official Ethnoracial Statistics in 21st-Century Latin America
Mara Loveman
2. Census, Politics and the Construction of Identities in India
Ram B. Bhagat
3. Education Censuses and Recognition: The Politics of Collecting and Using Data on Indigenous Students in Latin America
Daniel Capistrano , Christyne C. Silva, and Rachel Pereira Rabelo
II. The Politics of Institutional Autonomy
4. Population Census - Large-Scale Project of a Public Statistics in Transition
Walter J. Radermacher
5. Population Censuses in Crisis: United States, Brazil, and Ecuador in comparative perspective
Byron Villacís
6. The Latin American Observatory of Population Censuses: Increasing statistical literacy through an academia-civil society network
Gabriel Mendes Borges, Nicolás Sacco, and Byron Villacís
7. The Politics of the Population Census in Nigeria and Institutional Incentives for Political Interference
Temitope J. Owolabi
8. Censuses in Ukraine: not trusted and not needed?
Tetyana Tyshchuk and Ilona Sologoub
III. The Politics of Socio-Technical and Methodological Innovations
9. Establishing a Register-Based Census in Spain: Challenges and implications
Alberto Veira-Ramos and Walter Bartl
10. Towards a Register-based Census in Germany: Objectives, requirements and challenges
Thomas Körner and Eva Grimm
11. Techno-political Transformation and Adaptability in Ghanaian Census History
Alena Thiel
12. Adoption of Smartphones for Data-Collection during the Fourth General Population and Housing Census of Cameroon: Motivations, opportunities and challenges
Teke Johnson Takwa
13. The Global Politics of Census Taking: Conclusions and Desiderata for Further Research
Walter Bartl
Biography
Walter Bartl is Senior Lecturer of Sociology (Privatdozent) at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 41, Sociology of Population.
Christian Suter is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 55, Social Indicators.
Alberto Veira-Ramos is Professor of Demography and Population Theory at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, Treasurer of International Sociological Association’s Research Committee 41, Sociology of Population, and Vice President of the Research Network on Economic Sociology of the European Sociological Association.
"Nothing matches the reach of this volume! Learn what politicizes a census; produces questions on racial identities; expands the use of third party data. These insights instruct us in whether globalization of census-taking is in our reach, with far-reaching consequences."
Kenneth Prewitt, Columbia University, New York; Director of the 2000 Census, USA
"This truly international edited volume offers highly competent, nuanced, and empirically well-supported hypotheses to show how census making represents and enacts the classification of citizens; how it strives for autonomy while being part of politics and international standardization; and how the digitization of population registers might eventually make it superfluous."
Richard Rottenburg, Wits University, Johannesburg
"In an increasingly globalized and standardized production of numbers, this book offers an outstanding contribution to both a political epistemology as well as an institutional and methodological framing of census taking, making sense of what the state sees or avoids to see when counting its population."
Patrick Simon, National Institute for Demographic Studies, Paris
