Patricia Ahmed

Household composition in post‐socialist Eastern Europe

Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post‐socialist East‐European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.

Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States

1. Introduction 2. The Interactive Effects of States and Societies on Censuses 3. The Rise of the Racial Census in the United States 4. Italy and the Regions 5. Interventionist Censuses Develop in the Twentieth Century 6. The Post World War II United States: The Census and Identity Mobilization 7. The Insulation of the Italian Census 8. Conclusions

A State-Centered Perspective on Censuses

With the rise of the sociology of statistics, it is perhaps almost commonplace to view censuses as social constructions (Starr 1987:7; Thevenot 1990:1276). A naive—or bottom-up—positivism suggesting that censuses reflect immutable realities of populations is mostly discredited (Alonso and Starr 1987:1; Burke 1987:27; Desrosieres 1998:324–325; Espeland and Stevens 1998:338–339; Kertzer and Arel 2002:2; Nobles 2000:1; Petersen 1969:868; Porter 1995:33–34). The census is not merely an objective tool for realizing the Enlightenment ideals of democratic representation (Sussman 2004:98). Instead, the census is shaped by political and cultural forces that surround it, that is, it is “socially constructed.”

States, Societies, and Censuses

To start, we review relevant work that explains the relations between the state, society, and science. These literatures were long dominated by state-centered perspectives, but they have recently taken a more interactionist turn. We then turn to summarizing the general theoretical model that we developed in Volume 1. We argue that it represents a fully interactive view of the way that societies and states affect censuses. Our model thus draws on the interactionist turn exhibited by the larger literature on states, societies, and science. However, we argue that we develop this interactive view much more fully than this previous literature.

The Interactive Effects of States and Societies on Censuses

This chapter lays out our general model explaining how states and societies influence information gathering. We first develop a society-centered perspective, using micro-Weberian theories to understand how knowledge stems from social interaction at a micro level that is embedded within a macro context, Marxist theories to understand social actors’ explicit creation of knowledge within social locations and institutions at the meso level, and macro-Weberian theories of bureaucracy to understand states’ uses of information at the macro level. We then develop a fully interactive model that combines our society-centered model developed here with the state-centered one described in the previous chapter.

Population Censuses for Legislative Representation in the United States

The United States was a weak frontier state that nevertheless conducted an early census. State actors essentially argued for the adoption of the census as a practical compromise to link taxation to political representation. However, while the census grew out of fiscal information gathering, it was rarely used for these purposes. Instead, it was the first census used for legislative apportionment. Social forces, however, strongly shaped the census, as state actors drew on lay categories.

Interest Groups, Racial Mobilization, and the US Censuses

The US census, though it had only a few questions in 2010, remains a vibrant social institution. While numerous debates have always surrounded the US census, they became increasingly heated after the 1960s, involving issues of undercounting and the wording of the categories. Census data were increasingly used for administrative, commercial, and social purposes, including affirmative action. In turn, historically marginalized groups, at least partially empowered by the democratization of US society, pressed the Census Bureau to respond to their demands.

Regionalism, Nationalism, and the Italian Censuses

The UK and US censuses took off in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a relatively uncluttered institutional landscape. On the Italian peninsula, in contrast, there was a well-developed system of information collection in the regional states that predated an Italian national census by centuries (Volume 1). As we show in this chapter, during the Risorgimento (national Resurgence, 1815–1860), before Italy became a nation-state, well-developed censuses and census-like activities already existed in the preunification states. The makers of the Italian census faced the problem of repurposing this administrative apparatus to serve new aims. Thus, the difficulties of coordinating information gathering at several levels (e.g., the communal, municipal, state, national, imperial) continued to exist.

The Development of Race and Occupation in the US Censuses

Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the US census underwent a transition analogous to its UK counterpart. It was transformed from a rough headcount to one of the world’s most developed information-collection tools. Around 1900, the census became an object of intense elite lobbying. During the 1930s and 1940s, these trends accelerated as census data were linked to the distribution of resources during the New Deal and associated with social mobilization. This shift toward interventionism occurred in three stages. First, during the 1840s and 1850s, congressional struggles and individual conflicts refracted a brooding social divide that pitted the traditional southern planter aristocracy against the emerging northern industrial bourgeoisie. The planters were generally hostile to the collection of information because they saw it as threatening their paternalistic labor control. The industrialists, in contrast, were more interested in information. Second, roughly between 1870 and 1920, the influence of the planters declined, while the influence of the elite lobbies linked to the northern industry increased. These lobbies attempted, with limited success, to recast the census as a document relevant to their political and intellectual concerns. Third, the 1930 and 1940 censuses became tightly linked to social policies and lobbying and became objects of social mobilization. Concerns over immigration declined, and the census refocused on a dichotomous understanding of race through the categories of white and black.

Fiscal Information Gathering on the Italian Peninsula before National Unification

Italian information gathering developed in two intense waves in the post-Roman period. First, the late medieval and early Renaissance period produced a flowering of censuses, cadastral surveying, and scientific cartography (Jones 1997:452; Wolfe 1932:363–365; Zangheri 1980:39–51). The primary method was a declaration written by the taxpayer or government official in which land, people, and goods were simultaneously assessed (e.g., Comba 1977:1–23; Pini 1996:22–26). The second period coincided with the eighteenth-century reforms that swept the peninsula between 1713 and 1796 (Zangheri 1973:763; 1980:51–60). The primary method relied on expert-administered surveys and maps that focused on land, though they included some demographic information (Zangheri 1973:797–799). We examine the best examples of these methods: the Tuscan Catasto of 1427, the most comprehensive fiscal survey in late medieval or Renaissance Europe and the Lombard Censimento, the most sophisticated and technically advanced land survey in eighteenth-century Europe (Burke 1987:28; Capra 1999:435; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1985:xxiii). Both methods emerged, as in England, in response to political and economic crises that generated needs for increased revenues and were therefore tied to state formation. However, on the Italian peninsula, historical legacies of literacy, numeracy, and public documents facilitated information gathering (Jones 1997:220). Of course, Italy’s initial advantage in lay literacy disappeared after the Renaissance. However, once established, the use of documents persisted and formed an important resource for information gathering.