Abstract
As countries look to postpone censuses,
“They say, ‘Why do you want this information? Is this your concern? Why are you writing about this? Are you trying to spin it in a negative way?” said Chehayeb, a Beirut-based investigative journalist. Even if he does receive the requested information, he doesn’t necessarily feel he can trust it.
“They sometimes pick out selective supplementary information to boost things up a bit,” he said.
Lebanon hasn’t carried out a census since 1932, and Chehayeb feels particularly unable to trust data on the population.
“It’s a huge problem, especially if you’re doing a human-centred piece or an economic piece, right?” he said. “How can you gauge the Lebanese labour force? How can you really get an idea of what the unemployment rate is in Lebanon?
“I always try to look at other information to try to triangulate with what I’m given.” He does so by looking at data from international organisations, such as the UN, and from local institutions working on the ground.
This is an important year, with several countries, including the USA and Russia, due to hold their national censuses. Knowing that you are getting the right information is crucial but, as Chehayeb attests, it’s not always easy.
The original censor was a Roman magistrate tasked with conducting the census (along with overseeing public manners and morals). Today, a census is widely viewed as an apolitical process that merely seeks to count all the residents of a given territory. But censuses and population surveys can be as political as they are scientific: leaders have a vested interest in how many people respond and how people define themselves. As such, population data is vulnerable to political manipulation. Some leaders may seek to put off censuses for fear that controversial results might be politically damaging. In divided societies such as Lebanon, officially acknowledging the demographic growth of one community (Christian, Shia, Sunni) over another could also provoke civil unrest. Nevertheless, it is important for accurate population data to be collected and for the results to be made available.
“It’s in the public interest,” said Laurence Cooley, a political scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK, whose research investigates the politics of the census. “It’s also about generating data on socio-economic conditions, which is important for planning purposes.”
More and more countries, the UK among them, are considering replacing the census with administrative data and large-scale population surveys. But according to Jaime Nadal of the United Nations Population Fund, while the use of big data is very practical, it does not replace a census. Unless countries have a compulsory population register, “the only way to make visible [that which is] invisible is collecting information through a census”.
Governments almost always publish census data lest they be seen as having something to hide, although the Soviet Union’s action in 1937 showed that withholding such data happens.
“The organisers [of the census] were arrested and shot,” explained Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did not like the results of the census because they showed that the overall population had not grown as he expected.
CREDIT: Dom McKenzie/Ikon
Arel said: “[1937] was the year of the great purges, when almost a million people were shot on fabricated charges and many more were sent to the gulag.” The decline in population numbers could also be attributed to the 1932-33 famine, which killed millions of people, even though its existence was denied by the authorities.
A fake census was conducted in 1939 and the falsified results were subsequently released. The results from 1937 remained state secrets until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Nowadays, it is more common for countries to exclude specific communities from population data. On the one hand, as societies become increasingly complex and diverse, groups can be excluded by default when governments don’t improve their methodologies and don’t increase census budgets. People can be omitted by design, on the other hand, when governments discriminate against certain groups. During Burma’s 2014 census, enumerators refused to count the country’s Rohingya Muslim population, which at the time – two years before the beginning of the genocide – amounted to about 1.3 million people.
In the USA, where the 2020 census had been scheduled for 1 April, default and design have conspired to see the exclusion of LGBTQ communities from population data. Until the 1990 census, the gender of couples that indicated they were in same-sex couples was recoded (as if to correct an error) so that data files showed a different-sex couple. In 1980, more than three million people had their sex chosen by a computer. The Census Bureau no longer recodes responses, but the discrimination continues.
According to organisations working to advance LGBTQ rights, the Donald Trump administration has tried to diminish data that is being collected on those communities.
“They’re stopping data collection on communities that [the Trump administration doesn’t] want a public narrative to exist for, and they’re creating the data that will support narratives they want to tell,” said Meghan Maury, of the National LGBT Task Force.
At the same time, citizenship questions have, she said, been added to “a tonne of criminal justice surveys” in what appears to be an effort to drum up data linking immigrants to crime. “We’re seeing this administration playing politics with science and trying to do harm to our long-term ability to advocate for communities of colour and for LGBTQ folks, by making sure that there’s not the data we need to move those policy points forward.”
Aaron Tax, of Sage USA, an organisation dedicated to advocating for older LGBTQ people, gives the example of the Trump administration’s efforts to edit a national survey of elderly Americans that measures the efficiency of government programmes aimed at meeting their needs.
“The one and only question in this more than a 100-page survey that the Trump administration tried to remove was the LGBT demographic question,” he said. While a question addressing the “LGB” demographic has since been put back in, efforts to reinclude a transgender question have been unsuccessful.
“I think it speaks to a larger issue that we see across this administration in trying to erase the existence of LGBT people at large in all sorts of data collection instruments, including the census.”
Hungary’s far-right government is also alleged to have changed the metrics by which it measures population data, specifically around unemployment and poverty. According to data journalist Attila Bátorfy, of investigative news site Atlatszo.hu, domestic data places Hungary among the countries with the lowest unemployment rate in the EU. “But if we count [according to] the original EU standard, Hungary has the second highest unemployment rate in the EU.”
Bátorfy is increasingly mistrustful of the information provided by the government. “Sometimes you have a feeling that what you get or what is publicly available is not reliable or is manipulated.”
He says that although the authorities usually fulfil their obligations under freedom of information laws, the data is often full of errors and inconsistencies, and is sometimes unreadable.
Bátorfy uses data from Eurostat or the World Bank to compensate for the lack of reliable government information. “International conventions and contracts obligate governments to provide data according to international standards; the methodology, sample, definitions should be the same, or at least comparable,” he said.
“From 1948 to 1990, state institutions and agencies published mostly false information on society, but everyone knew that they were manipulating data and graphics in the service of communist propaganda. I never thought that, as a journalist and academic, I would face this problem again.”