Page 224 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS224 Jean-Michel Durr
operations, we will give examples of such cases in the various phases of the
census operation.

Questionnaire design
Whereas it is normal for the Government to express its needs for topics to
be included in the questionnaire for considerations of policy making, it can
happen that the Government or political leaders try to interfere with the
census operation by influencing the content of the questionnaire. In some
countries the census questionnaire is submitted for approval to the
Government, leading to possible interference as in Canada when the
Government decided to abolish the obligation to answer to the long form of
the census 2011.
Despite the risk to jeopardize the census due to the sensitivity of the
ethnicity topic, Western Balkans countries governments pushed to include
such topic, as well as religion and mother tongue, in the census questionnaire.
The most illustrative example is North Macedonia, where the distribution of
ethnic groups has a direct impact on the civil rights of the population groups
in application of the Orhid agreement. Despite warnings that asking for ethnic
affiliation in the 2011 census questionnaire would lead to inevitable tensions
among communities and frauds, the Government maintained its request to
include these sensitive questions in the census. The disorders and ethnic
tensions that these sensitive questions triggered during the fieldwork forced
to stop the operation after ten days into the enumeration period.
Nevertheless, it seems that the next 2020 census will still include these
questions. This example reveals the naive belief that a statistical operation can
collect any information, regardless its sensitivity, which is of course false. The
paradigm governing statistical activities is that respondents have no interest
in lying or in tampering with their answers, but if their response may have a
direct consequence on their civil rights, it is likely to generate frauds.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the formulation of a question on the ethnic
affiliation raised issues. International monitoring observers advised to stick to
an open-ended question, as recommended internationally, to allow
individuals to answer such questions freely, while political pressure pushed to
ask the question using predefined boxes proposing the three ethnicities
“constituents” of the population according to the constitution, and an option
“other, specify”. A compromise was reached, but this was not in full compliance
with international recommendations.
More recently, the request of the US Government to include a question on
citizenship in the census 2020 raised concern about the risk that
undocumented migrants might decline to respond to the census. By law, the
Census Bureau, part of the Department of Commerce, is not allowed to share
individuals’ data with law enforcement agencies, but some immigrants may

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