Counting Like a State: Intergovernmental Partnerships in the 2020 Census

• In Event: Political Behavior and Public Opinion Under Federalism

Abstract

State and local officials played an almost unprecedented role in the implementation of the 2020 Census. Given a variety of fiscal and political challenges, subnational governments have collectively invested billions of dollars to motivate participation in the count, especially among historically undercounted populations. The importance of these operations––which include localized advertising campaigns, outreach to nonprofits representing historically undercounted communities, and organizational infrastructures for triaging non-response issues in real time––were only magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, state and local investments in the census vary substantially. Some jurisdictions have created parallel organizational infrastructures while others have invested little or no resources. This paper will examine the roots of variation in state and local census investments as well as the consequences of these investments for census response rates in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I draw on a rich set of interviews with 76 state and local officials, as well as quantitative analyses of state and local investments and census self-response rates. Preliminary results suggest that state and local census investments depend on: (1) officials’ institutional memory of past census-related losses of representation and resources; (2) the governing coalition’s partisan identities and incentives; and (3) the availability of technologies and institutional resources for sensemaking. Preliminary analysis also suggests these investments are associated with higher rates of self-response. These findings have important implications for how we think about the role of intergovernmental relations in supporting critical governance tasks in an increasingly turbulent institutional context.

Author

• Philip B. Rocco, Marquette University