The U.S. Decennial Census: Politics and Political Science

Political scientists make heavy use of census statistics but have given scant attention to the politics behind the production of those statistics. Key issues that merit analytic attention by political science include vote dilution, the policy of population growth and composition, distributional accuracy and census undercounts, the establishment of statistical races, the color-blind challenge to the ethnoracial classification, the political independence of federal statistics, the important distinction between the scientific production and the political use of the census and other statistical products, public concern about government intrusiveness, and the shift from survey and census data to administrative and digital data.