Statistical Categories and the Construction ofSocial Reality: Representation, Compression, andVisibility in European Migration Statistics

This article examines how statistical categories contribute to the construction of social reality rather than merely describing it. Drawing on sociology of quantification and Science and Technology Studies, it argues that the problem of statistical representation is primarily epistemological rather than technical. Using European migration and employment statistics as a case, the paper shows how statistical categories produce a process of “statistical compression” through which heterogeneoussocial trajectories are transformed into standardized and comparable units. This process enhances administrative comparability and governance capacity, but simultaneously generates systematic forms of invisibility by flattening internal social differentiation. The article proposes the concept of statistical compression to capture this mechanism and discusses its implications for the analysis ofinequality, migration governance, and the epistemology of public statistics. By reframingrepresentational bias as a structural feature of quantification systems rather than a simplemethodological limitation, the paper contributes to contemporary debates on governance throughnumbers and the politics of categorisation. This paper is also available as a SocArXiv preprint