The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is legally designated the country’s independent central statistical authority with formal responsibility for all official statistics. Despite formal emphasis on statistical centralisation in Australia, there has been significant growth in official statistical production outside the ABS in recent decades. I argue that this is partly a product of a perceived tension between maintaining depoliticisation and meeting the needs of policymakers for new information, a tension managed by restricting ABS responsibilities to core statistical programs and creating new statistical agencies and programs to meet policymaker needs. ABS statisticians have exacerbated this trend by insisting on their absolute impartiality and sacrificing their claim to policy usefulness. ABS has a strong bias towards the production of economic indicators, reflecting the institutional settings it has operated in, including its formal location within the Department of the Treasury. The latter has relied on the ABS to bolster its own credibility in economic policy and has actively hindered the ABS from expanding into other statistical subject areas.

expansion as necessary for their policy agendas. Government statisticians have succeeded in creating a mystique around official statistics and convinced users that only StatCan has the capacity to produce quality data. Recent political interventions by conservative governments into the Census have shifted attitudes towards the need for greater formal autonomy, pressuring for reforms that formalised some aspects of Statistics Canada’s independence. Canada’s distribution of statistical authority has been shaped by the country’s institutions, including the Westminster administrative tradition, which moderated recent pushes to formalise StatCan’s autonomy.

In 1994, many responsibilities of Statistics Sweden were transferred to new statistical units operating within policy areas. Statistics Sweden has gradually accrued greater formal powers to oversee and coordinate official statistics in the country, leading to a partial reversal of the decentralisation reforms. Chapter 4 shows how credibility imperatives and institutional settings have shaped these developments. Decentralisation emerged following the end of social democratic political hegemony, when centrist and new-right governments demanded greater responsiveness and efficiency and sought to break up bureaucratic monoliths. Depoliticisation pressures, driven by the EU context, have resulted in a political push for recentralisation of authority. Statistics Sweden historically pursued credibility by emphasising competency, but shifted to stressing usefulness and demystification of official statistics. Sweden’s statisticians enjoy formal independence thanks to constitutional provisions that protect the autonomy of Swedish government agencies, but continuous informal dialogues are used to secure policymakers’ influence over statistical agendas.

The USA has a decentralised statistical system of 13 ‘principal statistical agencies’ and numerous smaller official statistical programs. Formal arrangements for autonomy differ between the agencies, including various models for appointing agency heads. The Chief Statistician has a unique role, not directly overseeing statistical production but with power to review and veto existing and proposed data collection initiatives in the federal government. There is a strong political imperative to steer statistics in support of policy agendas, resulting in practice incremental expansion of statistical collections to meet new needs. Support for statistical autonomy has a pronounced partisan flavour. The US separation of powers creates a greater number of political access points into statistical programs, but also a higher degree of transparency that discourages political meddling. Administrative traditions create an imperative to secure access to the White House, and the office of the Chief Statistician acts as a gatekeeper for this access, channelling statisticians’ demands for new resources and authorities to key central agencies in the executive.