Epistemic Conflicts about Demographic Data Gathering

Population statistics substantially impact many policy areas, such as political apportionment and the allocation of funds to subnational territories. In several countries across the Global North and South, the constitutive relevance of the census to public policy has meant it has often become politicised. Although the census is generally regarded as the foundation of public statistics, using state-of-the-art scientific methods, this politicisation calls its aura of objectivity into question. Furthermore, it is unclear whether new forms of data gathering and management would be able to mitigate such politicisation. In Germany, for example, discrepancies between the 2022 census and municipal registers were taken to the administrative courts by hundreds of municipalities suing the statistical offices of the federal states. Recently, largely unnoticed by the general public, the innovative method of differential privacy introduced by the US Census Bureau was officially discontinued by the Department of Commerce due to concerns about data objectivity. What will this mean for the risk of disclosing individuals' data, and consequently for the availability of census data for small-scale research? India and Nigeria postponed their censuses in the last round. While India's census, scheduled for 2027, will include caste categories for the first time since independence, this has been highly controversial. In Nigeria, the most fundamental sign of politicisation is the absence of a definitive schedule for the census.

This session aims to explore the causes and consequences of epistemic conflicts surrounding censuses and alternative forms of demographic data gathering. We welcome both conceptual and empirical papers.