ABSTRACT
Only a few nations still do not take population censuses, but both in Africa and Asia, six countries dropped the 2010 census. Ukraine postponed its 2011 census until 2021, conflicts destroying the trust between state and major population segments. Still, the United Nations Population and Housing Census Programme nearly succeeded to globalize the census as planned in the 19th century. However, homeless persons, persons without residence permits, refugees and “bad” neighbourhoods are easily under-enumerated. Over-enumeration of returnee immigrants often happen in register-based censuses.
Most nations’ censuses came back on track after World War II. The Americas had jump-started census cooperation, a basis for the UN to spread quality census taking. The Soviet Union restarted census taking in 1959, and afterwards during all decades. West Germany struggled with privacy protecting anti-census campaigns, but now fulfils Eurostat’s demands. The US reformed the census with the digital computer and self-enumeration. Several groups brought the Census Bureau to court, finding the distribution of subsidies to racial groups unfair. The Supreme Court declared that sampling to correct census bias and apportioning legislatures with unrepresentative census data is unconstitutional. Since 2005, the American Community Survey collects information annually from a sample of households.
A number of countries combine information in computerized registers on the individual level to construct censuses, some adding data from questionnaires. Registers lower the cost of census taking. The US, France, Germany, etc. need to build central population registers, which is costly and may provoke privacy protests. On a theoretical level, we can predict that the register-based census will increase states’ control over census categories and classifications.
