2019 Way Klingler Young Scholar Award Recipient

Assistant Professor of Political Science

The U.S. census is a bedrock of democracy. The decennial count determines not only how states are represented in Congress but also how federal funds are allocated and how the lines for state legislatures are drawn. Yet making the census as accurate as possible is a human task. Dr. Philip Rocco’s research examines what states, cities and communities are doing to ensure that everyone counts.

Rocco, an assistant professor of political science, has been named a recipient of the Way Klingler Young Scholar Award. He will use the award to conduct fieldwork on the 2020 census for a third book project, Counting a Fragmented Country: Federalism, Techno-Politics, and the 2020 Census.

Rocco will interview state and local officials as well as community organizations involved in educating and motivating residents to take part in the 2020 census. While the census is the responsibility of the federal government, Rocco is interested in how state and local actors are responding to emerging technical challenges as well as an ongoing conflict over the Trump administration’s decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census form. His research will investigate the factors that affect how public officials and community groups engage with the census, especially in areas where there are large, “hard to count” populations.

The project was inspired by Rocco’s prior research on the politics of American federalism as well as conversations with students in his Numbers, Policy and Democracy class.
“The census is a taken-for-granted part of American democracy,” Rocco says. “But
my students found it immediately fascinating. As we pored over old census forms
and data, their questions and insights helped to open up new lines of inquiry.”