Target Point

The Politics of Census Participation

Despite recent news reports to the contrary, Republican-leaning counties are actually more likely to have completed and returned their 2010 Census forms. 

With prominent Republican politicians and media figures such as Michelle Bachman and Glenn Beck discouraging Americans’ compliance with this year’s Census, there has been justifiable concern about how this might affect Republican participation rates.  To this date, there is no cause for alarm.

Statistical analysis shows us that in general, the higher McCain’s margin over Obama (measured as a percentage), the higher the Census participation rate was for that county.  Indeed, this relationship holds even when we control for other mitigating factors such as race and income. 

To identify this relationship, I ran a simple linear regression of county-level census participation rates by other potentially meaningful county-wide variables: median household income, percent African-American, and percent Hispanic.

The resulting equation revealed that as a general rule of thumb – controlling for the median income and ethnicity of the county – for every one percentage point increase in the McCain/Obama margin, we can expect a two percentage point increase in census participation rates.

To be sure, the income and ethnicity variables are much more powerful predictors of census participation rates (more than four times as powerful, in fact).  Nonetheless, the fact remains that there is a statistically significant relationship between participation rates and the 2008 presidential ballot. 

Ultimately, the percent of the population that was Hispanic or Latino was the most powerful predictor  (the more Hispanic the area, the lower the census participation rate), and median household income was the second most powerful predictor (as income increases, so too does census participation).  Details from the regression output can be found below for those that are interested in the gory statistical details.

One final note: to conduct this analysis, we made use of the Census Bureau’s daily census participation rates (broken out by a variety of geographies), that are available for download each workday on their website.  The Bureau is to be applauded for adhering to the OpenGov standard, putting raw public government data online in real-time and available for download in a machine readable format.

- Alex Lundry