We will use the turnover and WCBS surveys interchangeably when discussing the characteristics of organizations in Ethiopia, making clear which statistics arise from which survey. The turnover study was targeted at a representative set of local government, region and federal organizations. However, the WCBS was undertaken at none of the regions and federal organizations.

The surveys we use from Nigeria were initiated by one of the Presidency’s offices for public sector reform. Having trialled a number of approaches to civil service reform, such as improved training and monitoring infrastructure, the office decided it required more information on ‘bottlenecks to service delivery’ within the service, and in particular in the social sectors. It therefore engaged the Office of the Head of the Civil Service from within government, and agreed to fund a jointly implemented survey.

The Nigerian surveys concentrated on 65 social-sector oriented federal organizations out of the 383 federal ministries or agencies specialising in social sector service delivery such as water, health and education. It also sampled 11 randomly chosen state and 18 local government organizations out of 36 and 774 governments respectively. While the state governments are spread across the country, the local governments were sampled stratified by region and state. For each of Nigeria’s six geo-political zones, one state was randomly chosen, and then two local governments within that state were selected. To investigate the diversity of governance within a single state, it was decided that six more governments would be sampled from within one state, the state of Kaduna. Kaduna is geographically close to the center of Nigeria and is sometimes referred to as a microcosm of the country. This sampling strategy requires us to appropriately weight the Kaduna local government statistics when creating aggregates for Nigeria’s local government tier as a whole.

In each of the Nigerian organizations where an organization-level survey was undertaken, a sample of civil servants above Nigerian service grade level 7 were drawn from the nominal roll and invited to be interviewed (on average 13% of staff). Grade level 7 is the point at which the professional administrator classes begins, and thus it excludes drivers, porters, and other support staff. This provides us with both an organization-level survey and a survey of individual civil servants at each of 94 public organizations in Nigeria.

The other five surveys focus on the public official as the unit of analysis. What constitutes a civil servant, rather than a public servant or government employee, is hotly debated in the public administration literature (Gill, 2002; Daniel, Davis, Fouad and Rijckeghem, 2006; Pilichowski and Turkisch, 2008; Lienert, 2009). The specific subset of officials studied here varies across surveys depending on the focus of the research for which the survey was commissioned. In Pakistan, the focus is on public officials at the Ministry of Finance; in Nigeria the focus is on bureaucrats working in the social sectors; and in Indonesia, interviews were undertaken at both social sector organizations and the core finance agencies. However, all of the officials studied can be broadly categorised as members of the professional body of administrators who manage the implementation of government policy in lower middle-income and low income countries. This precludes many frontline service providers, such as teachers and nurses. Though they may be categorised as civil servants in some contexts, our focus here is on the middle layer of government, sandwiched between the politically appointed leadership and frontline staff. In most civil services, there is a formal ‘cadre’ system that denotes a specific category for each member of the civil service. Our respondents are universally in the professional administrator classes such as accountancy or management. Typically surveys of civil servants avoid the police and military, as do all of the surveys studied here.

These surveys focussed on issues best directed to the individual, and enumerated to a representative set of officials. An outlier in the time period we cover is the Ghanaian Governance and Anti-Corruption (GAC) Survey that was undertaken in 2000 and reflects early efforts of surveying civil servants at the World 6