on limited empirical evidence will struggle to explain the underlying variation documented here, and will therefore be a poor framework for academic study and an ineffective guide to policy.

Since there exists limited data on any single service, there is a rationale for presenting data from a range of countries together. There are certainly limits to the extent that we can compare statistics from one civil service with those of another. Definitions differ across services, such as what makes an officer a manager, and what their responsibilities might be. The importance of concepts such as satisfaction for public sector productivity or culture will also vary depending on the context at hand. However, with a limited understanding of what the civil service looks like anywhere in the developing world, providing international comparisons provides us with benchmarks by which to navigate a single service. Commonalities in civil service characteristics across settings also inspire introspection as to whether aspects of bureaucratic structure transcend context. The set of surveys presented here allows us to see that there are both strong commonalities and differences between the services we study, motivating a comparative approach.

It is time we get to know the civil servants who manage the policies that underlie the economic development process. The next section outlines the surveys that underlie the discussion in this paper, and subsequent sections provide descriptions of the civil service in the developing world. A final section concludes with some broad ‘facts’ about the civil service reflected across the data sets we study.

# **2 Surveys of Civil Servants**

In contrast to expert surveys of the public service as a whole, surveys of civil servants collect data from individual civil servants on their work, their divisions, or their organizations. This diversity allows us to map the variation across civil service life, as well as provide a far more detailed view of any specific area of government than broad aggregates can do. In contrast to administrative data, civil servant surveys collect diverse information on topics ranging from the nature of management practices to culural norms. Variation provides the statistical power to undertake quantitative research within a single public sector setting, extending the set of questions that can credibly be investigated.

The last decade has seen a surge in the number of surveys focussed on civil servants or the organizations in which they work. An online appendix provides an overview of the major surveys of the last decade or so.<sup>4</sup> Unfortunately, many of these surveys did not gather information from a representative set of officials, making interpretation of their findings challenging.<sup>5</sup> The surveys included in this review are those with three features: i) they surveyed members of the body of professional administrators of government; ii) they surveyed a representative sample of the targeted sub-set of officials; and, iii) the underlying microdata was available from the authors. These criteria leave eight surveys across six countries, described in

> 4See www.danrogger.com/papers.html for the online appendix.

> 5For example, the US Federal Government’s ‘Viewpoint Survey’ is a voluntary online survey that has had a response rate between 2010 and 2015 of approximately 50% (US Office of Personnel Management, 2015). The concern with directly extrapolating from the results of this survey is that the subset of civil servants that voluntarily respond are a non-random sample of those invited. This would matter less if the response rates were close to 100%, as the margin for bias would typically be small. To illustrate the issues with low response rates in environments of endogenous participation, we can assess the boundary values that the Viewpoint Survey’s Engagement Index could take that would be consistent with a 50% response rate. The Engagement Index is one of the central pillars of the survey and its dynamics are closely monitored. In 2015, the Engagement Index had a mean for the Federal Government as a whole of 64%. Over the past three years it has only ever moved 1 percentage point in any given year, but these movements have made up a central component of the discussion in the survey reports. If we assume that only those with the highest engagement with government fill in the survey, the lower bound on the true value of the index is 32%. Similarly, if we assume that the survey is only filled in by those with the most significant grudge against the government, and correspondingly with the lowest engagement score, then the value of the index could be as high as 82%. These feasible bounds eclipse the dynamics calculated from the sub-sample of US federal employees who regularly respond.

4