services covered. Rather, the paper provides snapshots of public service life in the six countries we study (Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines), making comparisons where possible. The topics surveyed in the paper are those covered in the underlying surveys, rather than a conscious choice to exclude other topics of interest.<sup>3</sup> A lack of direct survey evidence on public officials has contributed to a homogenous and often undesirable view of officialdom. Some of the survey findings presented here are in accordance with this view, such as the fact that respondents state that 17% of officials work fewer than their contracted hours. Other findings contrast with this view, such as the fact that the same respondents report that 32% of officials regularly work more than their contracted hours. Similarly, though local governments generally score lower on the international management index that we employ than central authorities do, and thus could be seen as requiring centralized support, there are many such authorities that are better-managed than their central counterparts. Surveys of civil servants and public sector organizations provide the data required to test long-held views of the bureaucracy, and reject them when they are wrong.

Three of the surveys we study take the civil service organization as the unit of observation, asking questions about organization-level features and practices. The 342 organization surveys were all undertaken in Nigeria and Ethiopia. Thus, section 3 on bureaucratic context is largely confined to discussion of these two countries. The average budget of these organizations is not dissimilar to that of an average African manufacturing firm, which does not seem large relative to the responsibility of their service. Many government organizations are poorly equipped to meet their responsibilities, and at the local government level across the two countries, less than 1 in 10 staff has access to a computer.

Five other surveys focus on the public official as the unit of analysis. Across the individual-level surveys, we study 13,591 officials in 204 organizations across 5 countries. The average civil servant in our data enters the service in their mid-twenties, spends a couple of years in an organization, and then transfers to the organization in which they spend over a decade, if not substantially more. Only for a small minority of civil servants is there much migration across organizations in the service. Those in central ministries have thousands of colleagues, many of whom they will never directly work with, while in local governments, the community of bureaucracy is much smaller. Across all of the organizations we study, officials in our data are organized into teams of seven staff who report to a manager. Three (40%) of the team are female and only two (25%) are dissatisfied with their job. Civil servants trust in colleagues is high relative to citizens’ trust of each other.

These broad generalizations correspond to some startling similarities among the services we study. Such commonalities prompt a range of potential research questions. Which aspects of service life converge to a ‘bureaucratic norm’ and which others are highly dependant on context? Micro-level surveys also allow us to document variation in public sector life where it exists. The best-managed local government in our data physically neighbors others whose management quality is towards the bottom of the distribution of management quality, implying that good management practices are not disseminating through the public sector effectively. Similarly, while some local governments have computer and internet access most of the time, others do not have electricity any of the time. The stark differences that exist between neighbouring organizations and even neighbouring officials highlights how ‘local’ the public sector can be.

All of this points to the importance of generating a rich description of the civil service in the developing world that can identify similarities and differences. Homogenous stereotypes of public service life based

> 3While I am unable to make comparisons with a Latin American state due to data limitations, Corporación Andina de Fomento (2016) provides a complementary perspective. Banerjee and Duflo (2007) also provide an excellent overview of the world’s poorest people, at whose service are the civil servants described here.

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