Lead academic: Dr Laurence Cooley (l.p.cooley@bham.ac.uk)
Academic partners: Professor Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham) and Dr Ian Shuttleworth (Queen's University Belfast) (project mentors)
Non-academic partners: Dr Valery Perry (Democratization Policy Council, Bosnia and Herzegovina) (project partner)
Funder and funding: ESRC Future Research Leaders (£93,894)
Context
In societies that are emerging from violent conflict between different national, ethnic, religious or linguistic groups, peace is often maintained through an agreement that these groups will share power. One of the main ways in which agreement on such power sharing (also known as consociationalism) is reached is through the proportional allocation of roles in government, the civil service, the military and the police to members of the groups that have been in conflict. In order to assess what such proportionality looks like, though, an accurate census is required. The process of conducting a census in this context can be particularly challenging, especially when group leaders know that their share of political power is partly dependent on the results. This can result in intense debates about how census questions are worded, and the conduct of the census itself may be affected by campaigns to get respondents to answer questions in particular ways, in the belief that this will influence their political representation.
Project aims
The project explored the relationship between the design of political institutions and the likelihood of the census becoming the subject of contentious political debates – a relationship that has thus far received little attention from scholars. The project’s primary objectives were to generate a body of scholarship on the relationship between the design of political institutions and the politics of the census in deeply divided societies, and to generate knowledge on ways to mitigate the possibility of contentious debates about the census in those societies. The research was primarily qualitative in nature and involved comparative analysis of four societies that have experienced varying degrees of contestation around the census: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. In designing and conducting the project, Laurence worked with policy-makers and practitioners in order to ensure that the findings had a positive societal impact through the development of a better understanding of how tensions caused by the holding of a census in a divided society can be alleviated or avoided.
Outputs
Cooley, L. (2022)'"It will do no more than annoy the protestants": The 1991 Northern Ireland census and the Irish language', Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 28(3), pp. 269-89, doi: 10.1080/13537113.2022.2052594
Balaton-Chrimes, S. and Cooley, L. (2022) 'To count or not to count? Insights from Kenya for global debates about enumerating ethnicity in national censuses', Ethnicities 22(3), pp. 404-24, doi: 10.1177/14687968211056379
Cooley, L. (2021) 'Census politics in Northern Ireland from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit: Beyond the "sectarian headcount"?', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(3), pp. 451-70, doi: 10.1177/1369148120959045
Cooley, L. (2021) 'Census politics in Northern Ireland from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit: Beyond the "sectarian headcount"?', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(3), pp. 451-70, doi: 10.1177/1369148120959045
Cooley, L. (2020) 'Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland', Political Geography 82: 102248, doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102248
Cooley, L. (2020) 'Census politics in deeply divided societies', in Richmond, O. and Visoka, G. (eds.) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_19-2
Cooley, L. (2019) 'To be a Bosniak or to be a citizen? Bosnia and Herzegovina's 2013 census as an election', Nations and Nationalism 25(3), pp. 1065-86, doi: 10.1111/nana.12500
Cooley, L. (2018) 'A political count: Looking ahead to the 2021 census', Northern Slant, 5 July 2018
Cooley, L. (2018) 'Keeping politics out of the census is much harder than it sounds', The Conversation, 4 April 2018
Cooley, L. and Mujanović, J. (2016) 'Population politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A reply to Bochsler and Schläpfer', Ethnopolitics 15(5), pp. 487-92, doi: 10.1080/17449057.2016.1190159
Download research brief: Census politics in deeply divided societies
Media engagement
'In Northern Ireland, Catholics now outnumber Protestants. That's a first', Washington Post, 5 October 2022 (with John Coakley)
'Northern Ireland census shows more Catholics than Protestants – a political scientist on what this really means', The Conversation, 23 September 2022
'What will – and won't – the 2021 census tell us about Northern Ireland's future?', Northern Slant, 15 March 2021
'A political count: Looking ahead to the 2021 census', Northern Slant, 5 July 2018
'Keeping politics out of the census is much harder than it sounds', The Conversation, 4 April 2018
'The politics of the census in consociational democracies', IDD Blog, 12 September 2016
More information
You can join the conversation about the project and the broader topic of census politics on Twitter, using the hashtag #censuspolitics.
For further information about this project please contact: Dr Laurence Cooley, email: l.p.cooley@bham.ac.uk.