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Numbers and Decisionmaking
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Public Statistics arid
Democratic Politics
KENNETH PREWITT
If, to paraphrase Harold Lasswell, politics has become how much for
how many, it is clear that measurement moves toward the center of political
life. The result is a politics of numbers-What is to be counted? By whom?
Can the numbers be trusted? In which direction is the trend line moving?
Who is at fault for the (now numerically defined) failure of a policy or
program? The intrusion of numbers into politics is global, as the world's
nations now endlessly debate issues couched in numerical estimates and
forecasts: weapon counts, oil reserves, trade balances, North-South ine-
quities, debt ratios.
With reason, then, scholars have focused their attention on how numbers
are generated and subsequently used or misused in politics. This important
scholarship rests on the assumption that public statistics are not politically
neutral. Decisions about what to count are influenced by the dominant
political ideologies, and numbers enter the political fray on behalf of social
interests.
The approach adopted in this essay accepts this assumption but focuses
it as follows: public statistics in the United States are generated as part of
democratic politics. This invites inquiry into the ways in which this par-
ticular nation's "number system" advances or retards democracy, informs
or distorts civic discourse, helps or hinders political participation. For just
as public statistics are not neutral with respect to the everyday politics of
group interests, so they are not neutral with respect to the principles and
practices of democracy. Consequently, to study constitutional democracy,
as it is today practiced in the United States, requires a perspective on
113
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KENNETH PREWITT
numerical reasoning and the nation's number system. Providing this per-
spective is a task for social theory.
There are of course unresolved issues in what does, or should, constitute
democracy in the United States. We cannot attempt here to sort out the
relative emphasis that contending theories of democracy give to such issues
as popular participation, economic and social equalities, the protection of
property, civil liberties and citizen rights, or democratic procedures. In this
chapter we take the simpler route of concentrating on two central issues:
accountability-how public leaders are held accountable for their perfor-
mance in office; and representation how diverse interests are represented
in setting the political agenda.
DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
The centrality of the concept of accountability in democratic theory de-
rives from the observation that democracies no less than other forms of
government have public officials with immensely more power than average
citizens. Democratic theory does not deny the power advantage enjoyed by
those in charge of the government, nor does it optimistically presume that
democracies are free of the tendency of power-holders to expand their
control. Embedded in a democracy, again no less than in other forms of
government, is a structure of bureaucratic and political power.
The task of democratic theory is to direct us toward practices that rec-
oncile the inclination of power systems toward dominance with the dem-
ocratic ideal of popular sovereignty. The basic terms of this reconciliation
are to be found in the Constitution, especially in the provision for separating
and fragmenting official power so that leaders can check and control each
other, and in the companion provision that regular electoral competition
will force leaders to contest with each other for the favor of the voters.
The general idea of this second provision is summarized in the phrase
"theory of electoral accountability" as first adumbrated in The Federalist
Papers and subsequently elaborated by Schumpeter and other democratic
theorists. There is competition for public office. Leaders present themselves
and their records to the electorate. Voters, basing their judgments on the
past performance or estimates of future performance of leaders, elect, re-
elect, or evict accordingly. Leaders, knowing this, and wanting to gain and
retain office, promote policies that will attract public support.
This theoretical formulation is a reasonably accurate though partial de-
scription of what, in fact, does happen. The empirical evidence has been
most compellingly presented by political scientist Morris Fiorina (1981;
also Kramer, 1971), who has demonstrated the use voters make of retro-
spective evaluations. Voters routinely reject incumbents who governed dur
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PUBLIC STATISTICS AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
115
ing a period marked by deterioration in social and economic conditions.
Another political scientist (Kiewiet, 1983:115) reports that voters "clearly
react in an incumbency-oriented fashion to the record of current office-
holders, responding positively to success in the economic and other arenas
but negatively to perceived failures."
Two explanations are available. Citizens vote according to recent changes
in their own economic conditions, or, citizens vote according to the im-
provement or deterioration of national economic conditions.
Under the fast explanation, votes would be influenced by the personal
experience of unemployment, the personal loss of purchasing power through
inflation, or the need to postpone homeowning because of high interest
rates. The citizen experiencing these negative economic conditions votes
against the political party in power.
Under the second explanation, voters punish or reward politicians de-
pending on the performance of the national economy during the incumbents'
tenure. For example, citizens who may be secure in their own employment
nevertheless vote against leaders whose policies bring about high rates of
unemployment. Or, citizens not themselves seriously affected by high in-
terest rates nevertheless take into account double-digit interest rates when
evaluating the performance of incumbent officials.
Somewhat counterintuitively, current research supports the second ex-
planation. Voters in the United States give more weight to negative or
positive trends in national economic conditions than to changes in their own
economic circumstances. The most extensive development of this finding
is offered by Roderick Kiewiet, who concludes (1983:1311: "Changing
perceptions of the national economy account for a considerably larger pro-
portion of the swing in support for the incumbent party from good years
to bad than do changes in personal economic conditions."
This research finding is important in the present context for what it
indicates about the function of national statistics in implementing democratic
accountability. If voters punish and reward officeholders less in terms of
personal experience than in terms of national economic performance, they
can vote responsibly only if they have some reasonably accurate information
about that performance. This information of course is often made accessible
when it is summarized as statistical trends. Political leaders can be judged
by the upward or downward movement of statistical indicators of those
socially important issues for which government has assumed responsibility:
unemployment, inflation, balance of trade, interest rates, test scores, pov-
erty levels, crime rates. When economic and social indicators are moving
in politically popular directions, political credit is claimed; when they are
moving in unpopular directions, political blame is assigned. Here, then, is
a contribution of public statistics to the workings of democracy.
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KENNETH PREWI1T
This application of numbers to the purposes of democratic accountability
occurs in a period when many other political developments undermine the
conditions necessary for holding public officials to account: the decline of
parlor discipline, even of political parties themselves; the increased costs of
electioneering and the related packaging of candidates by media experts;
the growing political influence of single-issue interest organizations; the
comparatively low rates of political participation. These trends occur as the
political agenda is ever more crowded with issues difficult for the average
citizen to comprehend. A weakened party-electoral system combined with
a crowded and complicated issue agenda is not conducive to democratic
accountability. Against this background, it is all the more important to
understand whether numeric descriptions of major social conditions and
trends can improve the reasoning capacity of modern democracies.
The hypothesis can be generalized. Just as a particular administration in
power can be evaluated by statistical trends, so also can broad social pol-
icies. In this generalized version, citizens continually evaluate and reev-
aluate broad policy commitments made by previous political generations.
In modern nation-states, this retrospective public reflection is facilitated by
measures of long-term trends. Descriptive statistics, especially when pre-
sented as trend lines, offer voters before-and-after information about the
performance of incumbents as well as of general policies. Consequently,
these statistics contribute to the procedures that establish accountability in
democratic politics. If we could leave matters at this point, the story would
be a welcome one for democratic theory. But it is more complicated.
Numbers, just as much as words, have the power to distort as well as
enhance the reasoning capacity of the public. The greater the importance
of numbers to the securing of power, the stronger the incentives to those
in power to make certain that numbers present a favorable even if inaccurate
picture. Across a broad front democratic politics must contend with ways
in which numbers distort and mislead.
At this point it is necessary to draw attention to an important subset of
any nation's number system, what are called "performance indicators."
Performance indicators typically serve two functions: they act as internal
signals for the agency, telling it whether its goals are being achieved; and
they serve as signals to those outside the agency, including of course those
who set policy and control budgets. These two functions subject an agency
to conflicting pressures. When an agency designs performance measures in
a manner that maximizes internal information, it invites external attention
to its failures as well as achievements. It risks sending negative signals that
those having power over the agency can use to trim budgets or punish
incompetence.
It is a familiar complaint that when officials are rewarded or punished
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117
according to statistical evaluations, they are drawn to policies that favor
how the agency presents itself to the oversight process rather than policies
that improve the conditions for which they have responsibility. The numbers
become more important than the progress toward policy goals they pre-
sumably index. Khrushchev (1977:71) is said to have lamented: "It has
become the tradition to produce not beautiful chandeliers to adorn homes,
but the heaviest chandeliers possible. This is because the heavier the chan-
deliers produced, the more a factory gets since its output is calculated in
tons."
Our interest is not in this well-known flaw in command economics, but
in the implications for democratic accountability. If the number system is
systematically manipulated so that personnel and policies are presented to
the public in the most favorable light, we have little warrant for claiming
that public statistics enhance democratic procedures.
We come here to a point in the discussion where the larger analysis of
democratic accountability intersects with a more specific argument about
the professional accountability of those who administer the nation's statis-
tical system. This accountability is to professional peers who evaluate,
against the standards of their disciplines, whether government statistical
agencies are maintaining the integrity of the numbers. Professional statis-
ticians, in and out of government, hold that proper controls and procedures
can protect the public from the abuses associated with fraudulent or mis-
leading statistics. In recent congressional testimony, Courtenay Slater, an
informed and experienced observer of national statistics, comments (1983:541:
"One of the finest things about our statistical system is that our statistics
have credibility. They are produced by professionals in the statistical agen-
cies and the press release that gives us our economic data comes out of
that statistical agency. It is written by professionals. Everybody knows it
is objective, and they believe the numbers are honestly presented."
There is no question that in well-established statistical agencies, such as
the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census, the production
and reporting of statistics is managed by professionals. The norms of profes-
sional control are deeply rooted in the origins of these agencies. Consider,
for example, the history of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which just
celebrated its centennial. The bureau was established during the post-Civil
War period of intense civil strife, and the statistics it produced were quickly
implicated in the arguments of the day about the causes and consequences
of industrial conflict. Labor reformers especially felt that if information
about prevailing employment conditions could be put "before the legislators
and the public, a cry of mingled surprise, shame, and indignation will arise
that will demand an entire change in the method of earnings and pay"
(Wright, 1870:381.
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118 KENNETH PREWllT
Although not disputing this assumption, the statisticians and social sci-
entists, who by now had organized themselves as the American Social
Science Association, wanted to ensure that the new labor statistics not be
seen to favor any particular economic interest radical, reformist, or con-
servative. The advice given to and heeded by Carroll Wright, founder in
1873 of the first state Bureau of Labor Statistics in Massachusetts and
subsequently first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics,
is instructive (Walker, 1877:vii-viii).
Your office has only to prove itself superior alike to partisan dictation and to the
seductions of theory, in order to command He cordial support of the press and the body
of citizens.... I have strong hopes that you will distinctly and decisively disconnect
Be [bureau] from politics.
This advice is no less heeded today than it was a century ago, and for
the same reasons. Perhaps no stronger testimony to the credibility of our
major statistical series is needed than the reliance placed on them by both
the political process and the marketplace. A member of Congress (Horton,
1983:2) comments, "It would be a public administration catastrophe if we
were to find that the statistics we rely on so heavily did not adequately
describe the real world of which we are a part and the problems we are
trying to solve." In the marketplace substantial funds are routinely trans-
ferred on the assumption that national statistical series are trustworthy. The
monthly statistical reports of the Crop Reporting Board of the Department
of Agriculture, for instance, have such high credibility that hundreds of
thousands of dollars change hands through the commodity markets as soon
as the data are released.
But even if we accept that professional control over national statistics
can largely eliminate fraud and greatly lessen bias in the most important
of our social and economic indicators, other issues remain. The statistics
of even the most professional agencies suffer from measurement problems
for which there are no presently available solutions. When these problems
lead to errors of serious magnitude and yet the numbers are used by political
leaders to set policies and by citizens to evaluate these policies, the ac-
countability process is compromised.
The aptly labeled "unobserved economy" offers a telling illustration.
Two scholars report (Afford and Feige, n.d.:14~: "Recent research suggests
that systematic biases associated with a large and growing sector of un-
measured economic activity have been introduced into the system of social
indicators. The unobserved sector escapes the social measurement apparatus
because of accounting convention, nonreporting and underreporting." If
the unobserved economy is growing more rapidly than the observed, that
is, "counted" economy, but policy is guided by statistics only about the
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latter, serious errors can hardly be avoided. This in turn of course distorts
the process by which fault is assigned, and moves us away from democratic
accountability.
The technical and conceptual errors associated with measurement are
serious, but for important economic and social indicators continuous profes-
sional attention and public discussion offer safeguards. The scholarly com-
munity here carries a major responsibility. Social scientists and professional
statisticians have the technical skill and career incentives to discern
discrepancies between what the statistics purport to measure and what they
actually measure.
These safeguards can operate only when the statistics are indeed public,
that is, accessible to professional attention. Such is not the case for critical
domains of national security policy, where secrecy prevails. Professional
review of the adequacy and integrity of, say, unemployment or inflation
measures is orders of magnitude more informed than professional review
of numbers purporting to describe, for instance, the comparative weapon
systems of the United States and the Soviet Union.
In a telling essay, McGeorge Bundy (1984) compares statistics on U.S.
nuclear weapons appearing in two publications: the officially produced
Defense Department ~4nnucz1 Reportfor the Fiscal Year 1985 and a privately
sponsored report of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear
Weapons Databook. The official publication consistently underestimates
American resources in a manner, Bundy argues, designed to make the
"Russians look big" and the "Americans small." This is the success
indicator issue stood on its head, similar to when police departments inflate
crime statistics to justify larger budgets.
At issue is not the inevitable tension between the claims of national
security and the right of the public to be informed, for we refer here only
to those numbers that are presented by the government in public discussion,
from the controversial "body counts" in the war of attrition in Vietnam to
the equally controversial "missile counts" in the debates about the window
of vulnerability. In sharp contrast to the care with which major statistical
series affecting social and economic policies are professionally monitored,
there has been little serious attention given to how independent professional
controls can be applied to military numbers routinely advanced in open
forums.
A democratic society is preserved when the public has reliable ways of
knowing whether policies are having the announced or promised effect-
Is inflation being brought under control? Is a war of attrition being won?
Are defense expenditures buying national security? Numbers, a part of this
publicly available political intelligence, consequently contribute to the ac-
countability required of a democracy.
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KENNETH PREWI17
Flaws in the statistics, whether inadvertently or deliberately introduced,
mislead citizens about the performance of their government, thereby di-
minishing accountability, but it can be plausibly argued that the wide public
availability of reasonably accurate statistics about social conditions for
which government is responsible enhances more than it diminishes dem-
ocratic accountability. This conclusion, at best an informed guess, rests on
assumptions about what is required if civic discourse is to be reasonably
informed under the conditions of advanced industrial societies. It also rests
on (largely untested) assumptions about the capacity of an electorate to
make intelligent use of statistical information. This last point we briefly
return to in the concluding section, after reviewing the second of our two
major issues connecting national statistics with democratic theory.
REPRESENTATION OF DIVERSE INTERESTS
As a document in democratic political theory, the Constitution's genius
is in its provision for the representation of diverse interests in political
decision circles. This commitment to representation involved the founders
in political engineering, one aspect of which established the close associ-
ation between political representation and the nation's number system. In
order that seats in the House of Representatives might be fairly allocated,
the Constitution mandated a population count. It further directed that this
count distinguish among the free citizens, the slave population, and the
untaxed Indian population. This distinction arose because the founders
wanted wealth as well as property to be reflected in apportionment count-
ing slaves as three-fifths of a person was a way to recognize their property
value. Representation had to be apportioned according to politically ac-
ceptable criteria. Moreover, the method chosen had to allow for adjustments
as the population expanded, redistributing itself among the existing states
or spilling over into territories that would later achieve statehood. Thus
was established the decennial census, the centerpiece of our statistical
system.
The limited use of the census to apportion congressional seats did not
satisfy James Madison. In early congressional debates Madison (1790:1077)
urged that the census "embrace some other objects besides the bare enu-
meration of the inhabitants." Madison suggested that the census describe
"the several classes into which the community is divided." On this basis,
continued Madison, "the Legislature might proceed to make a proper pro-
vision for the agrarian, commercial, and manufacturing interests, but with-
out it they could never make these provisions in due proportion."
We know from The Federalist Papers that Madison viewed society as
consisting of multiple and diverse interests. To govern such a society in a
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democratic fashion required complex information about the composition of
the public. Thus, for Madison, it was not enough that the census enumerate
the population for the sole purpose of apportioning. It should be expanded
to include many population characteristics, and thereby become the basis
on which the legislators could allocate taxes, benefits, and services ac-
cording to the "real situation of our constituents." In anticipating a de-
mocracy in which numerical proportionality cuts much deeper than assigning
congressional seats, Madison was ahead of his time.
Madison's opponents started from a different theory of politics. Reflect-
ing eighteenth century theories of the organic society, they "viewed the
object of government as the pursuit of an undifferentiated common good;
for them, politics was a sphere of virtue, and empirical investigation was
irrelevant" (Starr, 1984:371. In the early days of the republic Madison's
opponents prevailed. Enumeration was sufficient to serve representation.
Contemporary practice, however, is much closer to Madisonian plural-
ism, as reflected in the vast expansion of the national statistical system and
the policy uses to which it is put. The question before us now is how these
developments in the statistical system affect the political representation
process.
Providing for the representation of diverse interests in political decision
circles is at the core of the theoretical formulation known as democratic
pluralism, the now dominant interpretation of American democracy. Dem-
ocratic pluralism takes as its central problem the conditions that allow for
the participation by interested parties in various policy domains. Democracy
requires that there be no barriers to the organization and expression of the
full array of interests in society.
Democratic pluralism is an attractive theory. Since Me early days of the
republic it has gradually gained adherents among those who have puzzled
over the prospects for democracy in large-scale advanced industrial nations.
But the theory also has its critics. In recent decades the effort to formulate
a democratic theory has emphasized participation as opposed to pluralism,
and in the process generated a critique of conventional pluralist theory.
This critique holds that pluralism has not offered a satisfactory account
of nonparticipation in democratic politics, too readily attributing low levels
of participation to presumed citizen defects such as apathy or ignorance.
Since levels of participation covary with social and economic resources,
the critics argue, pluralism functions as a justification for the representation
of middle and upper class interests in politics rather than a description of
how the full array of social interests find a political voice.
An alternative explanation of nonparticipation is suggested by E. E.
Schattschneider's famous phrase, "mobilization of bias." In explaining
why the socially and economically disadvantaged often fail to participate
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in politics, Schattschneider wrote (1960:1051: "Whoever decides what the
game is about also decides who gets in the game." This introduces the
argument that what is on the political agenda provides a referent point that
selectively mobilizes participation across different social groups and inter-
ests. Citizens participate not just to put issues on the political agenda but
also, and more often, in response to the issues already there. This mobi-
lization process, according to Schattschneider, is biased against the interests
of the less well off groups in society.
It is in this theoretical context that we consider how the analysis and
political reporting of social statistics intersects the representation system.
Although our emphasis is on contemporary politics, the practice we draw
attention to is at least 150 years old. Starting around 1820, writes the
historian Patricia Cohen (1982:169), "Many private agencies and volunteer
groups with reformist agendas adopted the statistical approach to social
facts in order to document the dimensions of the problem they were ded-
icated to eradicating." Cohen offers several examples: the use of statistics
to describe the miseries of public prisons; the effort by the temperance
movement to prove quantitatively that alcohol abuse was a growing problem;
and local surveys of pauperism as a basis to challenge poor laws.
In deploying their privately collected statistics on behalf of social reform,
the early nineteenth century activists anticipated developments surrounding
publicly collected statistics that did not come fully into view for another
half-cenh~, when the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics was established
in the 1880s. The 1820 reformers were signaling to later activists that
statistics could mobilize political participation and inform public debate.
In the latter part of the twentieth century these possibilities are etched
much more deeply in our political life. The nation's number system uncovers
social conditions and popularizes them as statistical descriptions: proportion
of the population below the poverty line; incidence of child abuse; persis-
tence of structural unemployment; addictive behavior and its social costs;
the differential in infant mortality between whites and nonwhites; the gap
between male and female wages in similar occupations. The transformation
of politically unnoticed social conditions into visible statistics puts issues
on the political agenda that would otherwise be ignored.
These statistical conditions then provide a political referent point for
interested groups. This is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of twen-
tieth century democratic politics. Resource-poor social interests turn to a
statistical description of their plight to generate political pressure and to
mobilize adherents to their cause.
The history of the civil rights movement is suggestive in this regard. The
concept of institutional racism, which held that black poverty was caused
not just by racial prejudice but also by structural conditions of the economy,
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polity, and society, made its political appearance through statistics on res-
idential segregation, black-white income differentials, unequal educational
opportunities, inequities in access to health care, and so forth. Civil rights
leaders first used the numbers to emphasize the scope of institutional dis-
crimination. They then used them to gain political support for new social
policies such as Headstart, job training, and afDumative action. Other groups
have reached the conclusion that to be "measured" is to be politically
noticed, and to be noticed is to have a claim on the nation's resources.
Thus the physically handicapped in New York initially resisted being counted,
for fear that this would lead to further stigmatizing them, but then reversed
their position when they realized that political visibility closely followed
on statistical visibility.
Data presented in Michael Harrington's The Other America helped initiate
the War on Poverty by identifying the poor as a target group for government
action. The consumer protection movement, starting with Ralph Nader's
Unsafe at Any Speed, has made heavy use of statistical arguments, as have
the environmentalists. Describing public-interest citizen groups, one com-
mentator (Henderson, 1981:441) writes that "the quality and quantity of
information and the way it is structured, presented and amplified" shapes
their political choices and strategies.
Harold Wilensky (1967:19) generalizes these observations when he writes
that "facts and figures" assist those political interest organizations "weak
in grass-roots political resources." Information "may give an advantage to
the weak, whose case, if strong and technical, can count for something."
This is not a trivial observation when examined in the context of the effort
through He history of democracy to establish equal civil and political rights
in the face of inequalities in resources that different social interests bring
to the political arena.
In democratic theory as well as actual practice, organization is most
often promoted as the corrective when economic inequalities are repro-
duced as differential opportunities for political participation. The less
wealthy but more numerous social interests combine and increase their
political strength through working-class parties, social movements, and
interest groups. Consequently, a resource that helps to organize the re-
source-poor will help to correct political imbalances and promote broader
democratic participation.
This observation leads us to consider whether statistical programs can
actually help establish group identity and lead to the formation of interest
organizations. In a careful account of the interplay between ethnicity and
the census, William Petersen (1983:27) writes: "Few things facilitate a
category's coalescence into a group so readily as its designation by an
official body," and cites the importance of "questions put to them by
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KENNETH PREWl7
immigration officials and census schedules" for helping to solidify group
identification .
Hispanic-Americans are particularly important in this regard. More than
any group in American political history, Hispanic-Americans have turned
to the national statistical system as an instrument for advancing their political
and economic interests, by making visible the magnitude of the social and
economic problems they face.
In the processes by which groups are formed and diverse interests are
represented in democratic politics, public statistics are not an unmixed
blessing. Just as some groups can establish a political identity by being
enumerated, other groups cannot escape the way they are socially clas-
sified because of this same enumeration system. For example, for two
centuries we have had a statistical practice of racial classification, which
undoubtedly has contributed to the continuing salience of race in Amer-
ican society. Policies now being implemented could easily result in the
Hispanic-Americans becoming a permanent racial minority in the statis-
tical system, with what long-term effects it is difficult to foresee. More-
over, the statistical system is not sufficiently robust to withstand the
distortions accompanying severe political pressures. When political cri-
teria are transparently used to determine what should be technical issues,
such as the best way to count a population group, statistics lose their
credibility.
Racially sensitive measurement policies are not likely to be reversed
soon, now that so many government services are allocated according to
race and ethnicity. The brief period during which it was thought wrong to
identify race, gender, or national origins on employment or school appli-
cations was swept away by the emergence of affirmative action and statis-
tical parity in the 1970s. The nation has entered a period in which
"proportionate allocation" is carried to ever greater extremes. There is a
contagion effect: Once statistical proportionality is elevated to a principle
of government, there is great pressure from various racial and ethnic groups
to be fully counted.
From the perspective of democratic theory these developments are trou-
bling in at least three respects. First, to assign to the statistical system
responsibility for group classification and resource allocation is to transform
the thing being measured segregation, hunger, poverty into its statistical
indicator. Always in tension with the judgmental in politics is an insistent
search for objective rules to reduce the element of arbitrariness in subjective
judgment. The legal code is one such set of objective rules, formalized
bureaucratic procedures another, and now statistical formulas. This search
does not eliminate politics; it simply pushes them back one step, to disputes
about methods. Arguments about numerical quotas, availability pools, and
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demographic imbalance become a substitute for democratic discussion of
the principles of equity and justice.
Second, if statistical identification facilitates political consciousness among
some resource-poor groups, these same statistics make invisible to the policy
process other groups at the margins of social and economic life, where
measurement often fails the undocumented workers, the illegal aliens,
and the vagrant, homeless populations. In many government programs,
persons not counted are not there. Another difficulty stems from the inertia
of statistical systems. For technical as well as bureaucratic reasons, statistics
lag behind the dynamic patterns of group formation and change resulting
from immigration, internal migration, transformation in the occupational
structure, and new levels of social consciousness. Insofar as politics is
organized by the numbers, there will be a tendency to overlook more
recently established social conditions in favor of those already reflected
through the statistical system.
The third and most troubling danger is the shift away from a system of
representation and public policy based on the individual citizen toward one
based on the representation of demographic aggregates: ethnic, racial, in-
come, gender, etc. This shift invites, even mandates, the allocation of
benefits and rights according to group membership rather than individual
accomplishment or need.
To many observers this tilt toward group representation undermines the
fundamental premise of liberal democracy. Nathan Glazer (1975:220) la-
ments the drift toward numbering and dividing up the population into racial
and ethnic groups: "This has meant that we abandon the first principle of
liberal society, that the individual and individual's interests and good and
welfare are the test of a good society, for we now attach benefits and
penalties to individuals simply on the basis of their race, color, and national
origin." Glazer, of course, does not attribute the rise of quota politics and
group-based representation to the availability of statistical information. But
if statistical information has not caused, certainly it has abetted the emer-
gence of demographically defined groups as a category in public policy.
The formal system of political representation itself has not escaped the
insistent pressure for demographically defined proportionality. Abigail
Thernstrom (1983) artfully traces how the 1965 Voting Rights Act was
transformed in two decades from a law to protect black voting rights to
one that appears to require the "correct" number of minority seats in
legislative bodies. Demands for proportional representation, in which the
legislature is to mirror the characteristics of the population from which it
is selected, are not new. Until recently, however, group politics intersecting
with the electoral process was the preferred avenue for achieving this end.
Legal remedies were, appropriately, limited to ensuring fair procedures,
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not particular outcomes. Now, buttressed by statistics, laws have begun to
affect the very composition of legislative bodies.
As was the case in our discussion of accountability, we see in this
discussion of representation that countertendencies are at work. On the one
hand, statistical description can bring social conditions to public attention,
mobilize disadvantaged groups, and broaden the political agenda in ways
that lessen the bias inherent in an electoral representation system based
largely on the resources of wealth and political organization. On the other
hand, these statistics introduce practices and policies inconsistent with our
traditional understanding of democracy: the objectification of politics, the
assumption that that which is not counted is not there; the temptation to
substitute group membership for individual merit or need as the basis for
public policy; the allocation of legislative seats according to designated
racial or ethnic criteria.
We are far from having the evidence that would allow us to sort out the
relative strength of these countertendencies and again must resort to an
informed guess. With respect to democratic accountability I suggested that
the benefits of statistical descriptions outweighed the hanns. With respect
to the representation of diverse interests I am less sanguine. The distortions
of the representational process seem to me every bit as strong as the im-
provements. Moreover, the negative tendencies are not of the sort that can
be corrected with greater professional scrutiny of statistical information.
They are much more political than technical in nature and in fact become
stronger as statistics become more precise and reliable.
CONCLUSIONS
I conclude by emphasizing the theme that connects this essay with the
efforts of Ogburn and colleagues. The present inquiry has emphasized the
importance of close attention to the nation's number system by professional
statisticians and social scientists. Assuring the integrity of numbers involves
continuous improvements in measurement, revisions in concepts as social
conditions change, and the highest standards of statistical interpretation,
analysis, and reporting. Moreover, protecting statistical quality and integrity
will add little to democracy unless joined to the educational task of ensuring
that numeracy takes its place alongside literacy as a skill indispensable to
democratic citizenship. In the absence of public understanding of statistical
argumentation, the numbers will more likely aid political demagoguery than
democratic discourse.
Because of, and notwithstanding, the various problems and risks iden-
tified in this essay, those who care about democracy have a large task before
them: analysis of the political role of numbers, as well as a commitment
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PUBLIC STATISTICS AND DEMOCRATIC POllTICS
127
to making the numbers perform according to the responsibilities that a
democracy places upon ~em.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To fully acknowledge collegial contributions to this chapter would require
this note to be nearly as long as the paper itself. It was prepared while the
author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences. The working conditions at the center are much appreciated; col-
leagues at the center who provided useful commentary include Joel Aber-
bach, Paul Brest, Roger Noll, and Barbara Rosenkrantz. I am grateful for
the support of the Guggenheim Foundation, and also for the financial support
provided through the center by the National Science Foundation, under
grant BNS 76-22943, and by the Exxon Educational Foundation. I appre-
ciate as well critical comment from participants at the symposium on which
this volume is based and especially from anonymous commentators com-
missioned to review the very preliminary draft presented at We symposium.
In addition, this chapter benefited from We Social Science Research Coun-
cil's Conference on We Political Economy of National Statistics. A slightly
modified version is included in a volume based on that conference, which
gave me access as well to the editorial advice and sharp editorial pens of
William Alonso and Paul Starr.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
democratic politics
