When Census is an Election: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Over-Reporting of Headcount

The design of population censuses assumes that individuals are standalone respondents, but people qua respondents often believe that they are embedded in a context of interactive decision-making. In fact, communal anxiety is exacerbated by the design of census operations that tries to minimise the possibilities of double counting by simultaneously counting people across a territory through an extended (synchronous) method of enumeration. However, this engenders distrust in ethnically divided countries where the impartiality of the government is suspect. Under such circumstances communities may try to secure their future entitlements or protect their existing entitlements by boosting their numbers if they fear that the government will be unable, or unwilling, to stop other communities from manipulating statistics. The mismatch between the design of censuses and popular perception of the exercise has serious consequences for the quality of data but has not received sufficient scholarly attention. This chapter presents a game-theoretic analysis of competitive manipulation of census by communities. It shows that the degree of over-reporting by a community shares a non-linear relationship with the total number of communities and that larger communities are less likely to over-report their population, but a community is more likely to over-report its population if it is surrounded by larger communities.