Census 2000 and the Fuzzy Boundary
Separating Politics and Science
Kenneth Prewitt (New School University)
With an introduction by Sidney Verba (Harvard University)
Sidney Verba
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Speaker Kenneth Prewitt with Henry Rosovsky and John Dunlop.
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Kenneth Prewitt has had several interlocking careers:
as an investigator and teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford
University, and the University of Chicago, and as one of the major social
science administrators in this country—director of the National Opinion
Research Center at the University of Chicago, twice president of the Social
Science Research Council, and (between presidencies of the SSRC) senior vice
president of the Rockefeller Foundation. More than anyone else, he is a person
committed to the social sciences as an institution—to how they are organized,
how they carry out their research, and how they serve this country. In fact,
Ken is so smart about these matters that I was astonished when I heard that he
had agreed to serve as director of the Bureau of the Census, a position made
for losers.
The 1990 census had been very difficult. The 2000
census was faced with even more complicated issues and was already being
attacked in Congress. I said to myself, "Perhaps he's been smart for a long
time, but now he's finally lost it." Why did he accept the position? Ken is not
only a committed social scientist; he is also a committed citizen who believes
in serving the needs of society. One way to serve those needs was to make the
2000 census as sound and as objective as possible—and that is precisely what he
did. He brought the census in more accurately than ever before, and he did it
under budget. I am enormously grateful for what Ken has accomplished, and I
believe that the nation should be as well.
Kenneth Prewitt
The decennial census is the longest continuous
scientific project in American history. It is also the largest applied social
science project undertaken in this country. If you view it as a scientific
project, then of course its importance is in what it tells us about our
population and housing characteristics. But it is a misunderstanding of the
first order if you treat the census primarily as a scientific project with a
demographic payoff—because in America’s political history, the special status
of the decennial census derives from its political purpose: its predetermined
role in the reappointment of congressional seats, in the federal spending
formula, and in the enforcement of civil rights laws.
The roots of its political purpose are well known. The
decennial census is mandated by the Constitution so that the seats in the House
of Representatives will be apportioned among the states of the union according
to their respective numbers. The men who wrote our Constitution were superb
political engineers. They may have borrowed their theoretical ideas, but it was
their designated task to institutionalize solutions to the great problems of
government bequeathed to them by political philosophy. Among the most
challenging were the issues posed by federalism and colonialism. How could the
distribution of powers under federalism protect local rights yet provide
appropriate central authority? A bicameral legislature offered the compromise.
In the Senate, each state would be equal in voting power, but in the House of
Representatives, votes would be allocated in proportion to the population as
counted in the census.
Why a census every ten years? To solve the problem of
colonialism. Here was a new nation with vast territories that it intended to
occupy. The restless population was already crossing the Appalachians,
spreading westward into the Ohio Valley and down the Mississippi River to the
Gulf of Mexico. There was even speculation about reaching the Pacific Ocean.
What was to be the status of these soon-to-be-acquired territories? Would they
be annexed as colonies of the original thirteen states or be accepted on an
equal footing with them? Drawing from Montesquieu, the founders held that the
republic could not also be a colonial power, and thus the territories would
join the union as equal states. By measuring population growth and its
geographic dispersion, the decennial census served to regulate the pace at
which the western and southern territories were added as new states.
The census was political from the very beginning and
remains so. Although the science of measurement is used to complete the task as
accurately as possible, the central purpose of the census remains: to shift
power from one set of interests to another. When the figures for Census 2000
were released, politicians and pundits alike opined that the western states
would now get a more favorable hearing in the national government because of
shifts in congressional representation. If the census is both political and
scientific, how shall we accomplish the one without compromising the other?
To comment on this complicated issue, I want to begin
with two shadows that fell over the Census Bureau after the 1990 census. First,
that census was declared to be an operational failure; second, the bureau was
criticized for devising a methodology that invited political tampering. If
widely believed, the heavy charges of incompetence and corruptibility laid on
the Bureau would compromise the credibility of census counts and, potentially,
all other major government surveys. Two types of errors were cited:
undercounting or missing people, and overcounting or counting some people
twice. In this discussion, I will focus on what has become known as the
"differential undercount."
An undercount of some magnitude has occurred in every
US decennial census since 1790, when Thomas Jefferson conservatively estimated
an undercount of about 200,000 on a base of 3.9 million. George Washington
concurred that a combination of citizen resistance and flaws in the enumeration
procedures produced an official count that fell far short of the true number of
residents in the new country. In no decennial census since has the enumeration
process been able to account for every resident in the United States, nor has
it done so in any other nation. Demographers everywhere assume that a census is
an approximation of the true count—perhaps an overestimation, but much more
likely an underestimation. Insofar as the benefits of a census are allocated on
a share basis—as is true if the benefit is a fixed number of congressional
seats, now 435, or a fixed amount of federal funds—an undercount distributed
equally across geographic units and population groups will result in equitable
outcomes. Inequity emerges only if some areas or groups are counted at lower
rates than others—that is, if the undercount is differential, which we know to
be the case in the US census.
Although census professionals had long assumed that
the undercount rate differed from one demographic group to another, it was not
until World War II that the US had its first systematic measure of differential
undercounting. In the early 1940s the government initiated mandatory, universal
sel-ective service registration. Although obviously not its intention, this
universal registration provided statisticians with two independent counts of
males between the ages of 21 and 35: the count recorded in the 1940 census and
the count of those registered for the military draft. Comparison of these
counts provided the first reliable measure of how many persons, at least in
that demographic group, had been missed in the census.
Save for one factor, this finding would have attracted
little attention beyond demographers and statisticians concerned with improving
census practice. What attracted wide interest was that African American males
of draft age had been missed at much higher rates than white males. Here was
the first systematic evidence of a differential undercount.
In subsequent years the Census Bureau has tried to
deal with the undercount, but despite improved census practices, the
differential has persisted. The first important national examination of the
problem was a 1967 conference on "Social Statistics and the City," held by the
Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. That conference produced the
by-then-obvious conclusion that "miscounting the population could
unconstitutionally deny minorities political representation or protection under
the Voting Rights Act. It could also deny local jurisdictions grant funds from
federal programs." These themes are now commonplace in public discussion about
census design issues, repeated in editorial pages, congressional testimony,
scholarly studies, civil rights newsletters, and Census Bureau documents.
With significant issues of fairness and civil rights
at stake, how could the Census Bureau respond? The recommended methodology is
known as dual system estimation. It is similar to capture/recapture studies in
wildlife research. For example, you can net trout in a pond, tag them, and put
them back in the water. You can then repeat the process a day later and
calculate, on the basis of how many previously tagged trout are recaptured in
the second round, the total trout population. If one considers the census as
the capture phrase, a random follow-up survey is equivalent to the recapture
phase, permitting the calculation of undercount rates for many more population
groups in greater geographic detail. Despite methodological challenges, the
Census Bureau and panels of the National Aca-demy of Sciences and the American
Statistical Association all agree that appropriate techniques are available for
dual system estimation. The decision about whether to apply that methodology to
Census 2000 has not yet been made.
Whether dual system estimation is implemented or not,
the more important issue is what the two charges of incompetence and
corruptibility meant for Census 2000. The first charge was partly
self-inflicted because criticism from newspapers, the oversight committee of
Congress, and others was accompanied by criticism from the Census Bureau
itself. While the public accepted that judgment—and the concept of a "failed"
census—the l990 census was not, in fact, a failure in any serious sense. It was
and is being used for all its intended purposes, including reapportionment,
redistributing, and the allocation of federal funds. One measure of its
accuracy is that in 1990, as opposed to 1980, the census reduced overcounts in
a number of areas.
There remains the charge of political corruptibility
and its relation to the persistent undercount. In 1990 the Census Bureau
recommended the use of dual system estimation to reduce the differential
undercount. Rejecting the recommendation, Robert Mosbacher, then Secretary of
Commerce, expressed the concern that adjustment would open the door to
political tampering with the census in the future. This passage, as best I can
determine, is the first instance in American political history in which a high
government official gives voice to the speculation that the nonpartisan,
professionally managed Census Bureau might choose a data-collection methodology
so as to favor one political party over another.
Over the next several years, the conditional warning
about what could happen turned into the accusation that the proposed
methodology for Census 2000 was, in fact, designed to achieve a partisan
outcome. The Republican National Committee declared, "The Clinton
Administration is implementing a radical new way of taking the next census that
effectively will add nearly four and one-half million Democrats to the nation's
population." Political fights over the census have occurred throughout history,
but they have been regional—between slave and non-slave states, between
conservative southern and midwestern industrial states—and they have focused on
the use of census results. In the 1990s the focus shifted to census
methodology. In my view, both sides of the aisle now believe that the Census
Bureau is capable of, and would design, a census that could have a known
partisan outcome. For the past three or four years, every vote on the census in
the US Congress has divided along party lines.
Because the 1990 census was thought to have been an
operational failure, an oversight apparatus unprecedented in this country's
fiscal history was put into place. It included nearly two hundred full-time
employees drawn from four congressional committees, the General Accounting
Office (an investigatory arm of Congress), the office of the Inspector General
(an investigatory arm of the Executive Branch), and a specially appointed
Census Monitoring Board, as well as a half-dozen major standing advisory
committees, including one appointed by the National Academy of Sciences.
Justified on operational grounds, the apparatus soon became a focus of
political oversight as well. To deal with this scrutiny, the Census Bureau
invited transparency and actively cooperated with these groups, providing
information on what it planned to do, how decisions would be made, and the
actual steps that were taken. Its efforts to respond took countless hours of
senior management time, but they did blunt the charges of incompetence and
partisanship.
Political fights about census methodology will
continue to interfere with efforts to achieve a better census. We need more
science in the process rather than less. For example, to fully apply dual
system estimation, it would be useful to provide more time to correct the count
than current law allows. The census calendar of nine months for apportionment
counts and twelve for redistricting data was set in 1932, when the nation was
much easier to measure. Despite the complexity of the technical process and the
pending decision about whether adjustment is or is not going to be made, the
Census Bureau must have redistricting data out by April 1. If the decision
could be postponed for another six or nine months, the process could be made
more precise.
In the most immediate sense, the Census Bureau must
continue to demonstrate that its traditions and its competencies are not
consistent with advancing a political agenda. Throughout its history, it has
been resolutely professional and apolitical. Its peer community is the
professional statistical community worldwide, and it earns respect in that
community by providing accurate data. The process of internal deliberation and
external transparency will continue through every step of the implementation of
Census 2000 and will be available for public review. The bureau will take every
step possible to demonstrate that, in its design and implementation,
statistical adjustment is based on the best technical judgment available and
never involves partisan consideration.
I want to conclude with an observation about the
meaning of Census 2000. When its history is written, the issues surrounding
sampling and other aspects of measurement theory will be a footnote—albeit an
important footnote—to the real story of this count: multiracial identity. With
"Question 8: What is this person's race? Mark one or more," we turned a corner
about how we think about race in this country. Census 2000 identifies five
discrete racial groups: white; African American, black, or Negro; Asian; Native
Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; and American Indian or Alaskan Native. It
also allows respondents to select an "other" category, making a total of six.
There are 63 possible combinations to how the race question can be answered.
And if these 63 are subdivided by Hispanic and non-Hispanic groupings (which
are treated by the census as ethnic rather than racial distinctions), there are
126 categories.
There is no way to measure race. Race is not a
scientific construct but a political one. During the nineteenth century, the
census counts helped put in place a discriminatory set of social policies. In
the second half of the twentieth century, the census has been a tool to undo
that discrimination. It is unlikely that more than a small percentage of the
population will describe themselves as multiracial in Census 2000. But this
expected change in self-identification has long-term and unpredictable
consequences for race-conscious social policy. Laws prohibiting racial or
ethnic discrimination in such areas as education, housing, and employment
assume a small number of fixed racial or ethnic groups. With the proliferation
of different multiracial groups in society and the general blurring of racial
boundaries, the future of enforcing such laws in unclear. The task of the
Census Bureau will be to provide the most accurate data for those who will
determine the parameters of social justice.
Introduction © 2001 by Sidney Verba. Communication ©
2001 by Kenneth Prewitt. Photo © 2001 by Mark Morelli.
This presentation was given at the 1841st Stated
Meeting, held at the House of the Academy in Cambridge on January 10, 2001. Mr.
Prewitt's remarks were based in part on his paper "The US Decennial Census:
Political Questions and Scientific Answers" (Population
and Development Review, March 2000).
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