Article by Stefaan Verhulst, Roeland Beerten and Johannes Jutting: Declining survey responses, politically motivated dismissals, and accusations of “rigged” numbers point to a dangerous spiral where official statistics — the bedrock of evidence-based policy — becomes just another casualty of distrust in government. In the below, we suggest a different path: moving beyond averages and aggregates toward more citizen-centric statistics that reflect lived realities, invite participation, and help rebuild the fragile trust between governments and the governed.
“What gets measured gets managed,” the adage goes. But what if what gets measured fails to reflect how people actually live, how they feel, and perhaps more importantly, what they care about? For too long, statistical agencies, the bedrock of evidence-based policymaking, have privileged averages over outliers, aggregates over anomalies, and the macro over the personal–in short, facts over feelings. The result? A statistical lens that often overlooks lived realities and held perceptions.
The strong emphasis on averages, national-level perspectives, and technocratic indicators always carried certain risks. In recent years the phrase “You can’t eat GDP” has popped up with increasing frequency: neatly constructed technical indicators often clash with lived reality, as citizens discovered during the post-COVID years of persistently high inflation for basic goods. Policies that failed to address citizen concerns have fueled discontent and anger in significant parts of the population, paving the way for a surge of populist and anti-democratic parties in both rich and poor countries. In today’s era of polycrisis, there is a growing imperative for reimagined policy processes that innovates and regains citizen trust. For that, we need to reinvent what and how we collect, interpret, use and communicate the evidence base for policies. In short, we need more trustworthy statistical foundations.
The challenge, it is important to emphasize, isn’t merely technical. It is epistemological and democratic. We face a potential crisis of inclusion and accountability, in which the question is not only how to measure, but also who gets to decide what counts as knowledge. If statistics remain too narrowly focused on averages and aggregates, they risk alienating the very citizens they are meant to serve. The legitimacy of official statistics will increasingly depend on their ability to reflect lived realities, incorporate diverse perspectives, and communicate findings in ways that resonate with public experience. In what follows, we therefore argue that, if official statistics are to remain legitimate, and trusted, they must evolve to include lived experiences — an approach that we call citizen-centric statistics…(More)”.
