‘No status – no census!’ The causes and consequences of the 1971 and 1981 Northern Ireland census boycotts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite Northern Ireland having been established on the basis of statistics from the 1911 census and the centrality of religious demography to many accounts of its conflict, little has been written about the political history of census-taking there. This paper contributes to addressing this oversight by exploring two related controversies in that history: the 1971 and 1981 census boycotts. Through use of archive materials, it demonstrates how concerns about the privacy of personal information collected by the census against the backdrop of the Troubles, were mixed with broader motivations whereby the census was seen as a symbolic target for protest and boycott in the context of discrimination against Catholics and the republican movement’s campaign for political status for its prisoners, with the 1981 boycott taking place during the hunger strike of that year. Despite a perhaps surprisingly low rate of overall non-response to the census given calls for it to be boycotted, the boycotts did have a significant impact and a legacy that lasted into the 1990s—by which time republicans’ attitude towards the census had changed for the positive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".