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Data

Population census recently completed

See all data and research on:
State Capacity

About this data

Population census recently completed
A census is defined as a population count that meets three requirements: universality, well-defined territory, and simultaneity.
Source
Thomas Brambor et al. (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 20, 2023
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1750–2015

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Thomas Brambor et al. – Information Capacity Dataset

Thomas Brambor, Agustín Goenaga, Johannes Lindvall and Jan Teorell created The Information Capacity Dataset for their article "The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State". The Information Capacity Dataset offers numerical data on five institutions and policies that modern states use to collect information about their populations and territories: (1) the regular implementation of a reliable census, (2) the regular release of statistical yearbooks, the operation of (3) civil and (4) population registers, and (5) the establishment of a government agency tasked with processing statistical information. The dataset also includes an overall index of “information capacity” for 85 polities from 1750 to 2015.

Retrieved on
November 10, 2023
Retrieved from
http://www.stanceatlund.org/information-capacity-dataset.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Brambor, Thomas, Agustín Goenaga, Johannes Lindvall and Jan Teorell (2019) "The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State", Comparative Political Studies, version of record published online 2019

Thomas Brambor, Agustín Goenaga, Johannes Lindvall and Jan Teorell created The Information Capacity Dataset for their article "The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State". The Information Capacity Dataset offers numerical data on five institutions and policies that modern states use to collect information about their populations and territories: (1) the regular implementation of a reliable census, (2) the regular release of statistical yearbooks, the operation of (3) civil and (4) population registers, and (5) the establishment of a government agency tasked with processing statistical information. The dataset also includes an overall index of “information capacity” for 85 polities from 1750 to 2015.

Retrieved on
November 10, 2023
Retrieved from
http://www.stanceatlund.org/information-capacity-dataset.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Brambor, Thomas, Agustín Goenaga, Johannes Lindvall and Jan Teorell (2019) "The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State", Comparative Political Studies, version of record published online 2019

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

This indicator is constructed by taking the value of the Census was run variable for the current year and the previous nine years and summing them up. The indicator takes the value 1 if the sum is greater than 0 and 0 otherwise.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Population census recently completed”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from Thomas Brambor et al.. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/population-census-brambor.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Thomas Brambor et al. (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Thomas Brambor et al. (2019) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Population census recently completed” [dataset]. Thomas Brambor et al., “Information Capacity Dataset” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/population-census-brambor.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-census-brambor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear