Class 7. October 23. Understanding local community 1: Data sources
Methods: Census, administrative data, voter file, voting patterns, turnout, election results, designing political and administrative districts
(Friday, October 25: open for site visits, meetings, etc.)
Expert: Dr. Joseph Salvo, NYC Department of City Planning chief demographer
Readings or applications:
Kenneth Prewitt, 2010. “The U.S. Decennial Census: Politics and Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 13:237-254.
W. P. O’Hare, 2019. “The Importance of Census Accuracy: Uses of Census Data,” Differential Undercounts in the U.S. Census, SpringerBriefs in Population Studies.
Population Reference Bureau, 2019. Why Are They Asking That? What Everyone Needs to Know About 2020 Census Questions.
John R. Logan, 2018. “Relying on the Census in Urban Social Science,” City & Community 17:3 (September): 540-564.
John Mollenkopf, 2019. “New York City Civic Engagement Survey”
New York City Charter Revision Commission, 2019. “Elections Proposals”
New York City Charter provisions on Redistricting (Section 2A, 50-52).
It is such a very important time to be thinking about the census as it informs urban policy and dynamics of people and place. Two interesting ideas that came through in the readings regarding the way we think about our site are the danger of thinking about census tracts as neighborhoods, and the disconnect between racial categories on the census (today and historically) and reality.
I was most struck by Prewitt’s idea: “it is in this sense [that when race is studied it is the statistics of race] that the nation has statistical races” (Prewitt 247). This acknowledgement, and his critiques present in the article, identifies gaps often not adequately addressed in some forms of statistical research. Additionally, the neatness of categories not only for people but for neighbors through census tracts also leaves out the imprecise interactions of communities across fixed neighborhood “boundaries.” Cultural, religious, educational, and social intersections of residential communities move beyond the buckets of organization implied by the census.
Both of these limitations of what is still a very useful system of understanding urban life come into play when we think about Gowanus and the stakeholders present. As Toby has brought up and we have thought about before, the “community” does not end where Brad Lander’s political boundary tells us, and intersections of race, language, and residence can not always be accounted for unless you have a strong pulse on the area. As we can see by looking at the map of census tracts (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/publications/maps/bk-census-tracts-map.pdf), Gowanus is adjacent to more than five tracts, with different characteristics and folks well beyond the official boundaries that move through the space to access transit, go to work and school, practice their religions, and buy groceries. In this sense, just as Prewitt argues we have “statistical races,” we also have “statistical communities.” It is thus for us to engage with our contacts in the neighborhood to understand exactly who we are referencing when we talk about “community” in Gowanus.
Like Ali said, this is such an important time to be talking about not just the importance of collecting Census data but also to be acknowledging the inherent political and racial (or even racist) backdrop in the way Census data is collected. I especially appreciated Kenneth Prewitt’s historical approach to unpacking the political dimensions of collecting Census data, which he describes as being as much about counting as it is classification. While on the surface, Census data collection seems to be a neutral bureaucratic activity, what makes it political is that it could determine how much funding is allocated to a particular area and it also helps with redistricting. What makes it a potentially racist undertaking is the fact that communities of color are consistently undercounted, which means they also end up underfunded and underrepresented.
I also appreciated John Logan’s skepticism about the actual impact of the controversial Trump administration “citizenship” question on the ability to account for undocumented immigrants in the Census. He claims that undocumented folks are already suspicious of the government so they are unlikley to respond. While I don’t think this means lawmakers shouldn’t have opposed the question being included in the Census since it is about counting all people residing in the US, it’s important to highlight that communities with large undocumented populations are already undercounted and therefore underfunded and underrepresented.
Another aspect of the Logan piece that I think is most relevant to our work is the importance for urban researchers to move beyond Census data and use ethnographic methods among others to get the full picture. When urban researchers take Census data at face value, they are likely to produce research that isn’t actually representative of the urban sites they are studying. That is to say, Census data can provide foundational information, however, the urban researcher will be best served by actually talking to people. In many ways, this is what John and his team uncover in their New York City Civic Engagement Study (NYCCES): while the Current Population Survey (CPS) found that just 16.5% of respondents volunteers their time and participate in civic life, the NYCCES found that number to be closer to 52.8%. Because the NYCCES focused on a smaller (but still representative) sample while engaging in interviews and ethnographic methods to collect data, they got a more granular picture of civic engagement. This is an important lesson for our class as we look to understand Gowanus.
The readings brought to my attention how little we (as in, people who study South Africa) know about the politics of the post-apartheid South African census. There don’t seem to be any studies to this effect.
The census, because it doesn’t have major electoral ramifications, is a less prominent feature of South African politics. The country uses a proportional electoral system, translating number of votes very directly into number of seats. So there is no allocation of seats by population. There is almost no opportunity for gerrymandering. I say almost no opportunity, because, first, it is possible to change the boundaries of provinces and municipalities and this could possibly have an electoral rationale. Certainly, it did when the system of wall-to-wall municipalities was formed in the mid-1990s. Census data was important to those efforts. Since that period, however, under conditions of African National Congress (ANC) electoral dominance, no incumbency has been won or lost following a redrawing. Changing boundaries of governments is much more disruptive and contentious than changing the boundaries of constituencies, so I don’t expect this to become a major dynamic in future.
Second, gerrymandering is possible for local wards. These are the only constituency-based structures in South Africa’s electoral architecture. They’re run on a first-past-the-post basis, but constitute only half of local council seats and proportionality is made up through a simultaneous proportional representation vote, i.e. if a party gets more ward seats than its proportion of votes, then it will get less proportional representation seats then it would otherwise get to balance the difference. There is – reports on the ground suggest – considerable gerrymandering at this level. Ward councilors, unlike proportional representation councilors, are given certain legal-administrative and symbolic powers that can be used for constituency service and patronage. These have intrinsic value to party cadres and they probably do confer on the parties significant electoral advantage. Ward boundaries are drawn by a formally independent but de facto politicized Municipal Demarcation Board. It uses census data which includes electorally relevant classifications of race and language (i.e. ethnicity).
There is then also the matter of the use of census data for more bureaucratic distributive purposes. There are some very important national distributive processes that rely on the census. Constitutionally, provinces have very limited own-revenue powers and so they instead receive from national in the form of a no-strings-attached equitable share, which allocates national revenue to provinces on the basis of a formula that includes census numbers, and conditional grants, where South Africa’s National Treasury would also have regard for the census. South Africa’s education, health, and housing programmes are all primarily provincial competencies, are heavily informed by the census, and are massively redistributive. I’ve spent some time in education bureaucracies in poorer provinces, and a standing complaint is that the education portion of the equitable share only takes into account school-age population, but costs are heavily affected by geography (another job for GIS), income and poverty levels, and so on. Municipalities also receive grants and make allocative decisions on the basis of census numbers.