ABSTRACT
How can statistical facts be simultaneously constructed and yet objective? What framework conditions and precautions are needed so that statistics can play their role as a trustworthy advocate of objectivity in difficult social conflicts, decision-making and communication processes? What risks of political influence in the sense of manipulation must be averted? How can we replace false and naïve belief in the truth of statistics with a better understanding and more realistic expectations about the product ‘information’, without smashing the porcelain of trust? Official statistics have emerged as an answer to those questions in the past, in their history reflecting the societal and political circumstances, and information needs of their time as well as data availabilities and statistical methods. Official statistics are more than an assembly of specific surveys, and they are a coherent system with an architecture that also corresponds to the respective conditions of a time and a country. Three areas have a particular role to play in several respects (not least because of their expense and budget); they are something like the cornerstones of the business architecture that are important for the statics of the entire system: national accounts and external trade for economic statistics and population censuses for demographic and social statistics. In this sense, the population census and its perspectives are interrelated with the system of official statistics, which in turn is closely linked with social developments and social issues. Patterns and questions of development of population censuses, whether methodological, technical or political, are therefore usually of importance to the whole system and vice versa.
