is rejected with a p-value of 0.00. Regional and federal organizations have almost identical distributions of errors, though regional organizations are slightly more prone to outliers.

Figure 2B plots the distribution of z-scores where adjustments are made to skewed underlying distributions when necessary. Conditional on differences in the ranges of the distribution produced by the two different methods, the graph is qualitatively similar to that of the unadjusted z-scores. The adjusted scores have a more even distribution of extreme values, as would be expected. Figure 2C plots the rank-proportion transformation, and while district errors continue to be substantially smaller than those at higher tiers, some distinctions arise between the regional and federal government levels. Overall, along the margin of decentralization across tiers, the three measurement methods provide highly consistent messages.

# **3.2 What is the Appropriate Conception of Information in the Public Sector?**

These errors in bureaucratic beliefs matter because they are used as the basis of public policy decisions. In our representative survey of public officials, we asked public servants, “What are the three most important sources of information you use to find out about the state of service delivery in your jurisdiction?” along the following margins: ‘Informal interactions e.g. through co-workers’, ‘Management Information Systems’, ‘Formal field visits’, ‘Reports from the frontline’, ‘Information from higher-tier institutions’, ‘Formal citizen/user interactions’, or ‘Media sources’. Officials were asked to rank their top three sources or specify that others are more important.<sup>16</sup> In our setting, information is dominantly sourced from inside the public service rather than externally from the media. Only 8.93% of public officials in our survey responded that media sources were one of their top three sources of information, and 2.12% of officials selected it as their top source of information. This finding was consistent across tiers, with 8.54% of federal, 8.56% of regional and 9.18% of district officials stating media was one of their top-3 information sources, across sectors and across grades. That public officials are heavily reliant on information produced by the public service is consistent with the findings of AidData’s ‘Decoding Data Use’ project (Masaki et al., 2017). Similarly, a review of Ethiopia’s ‘Sector Development Program IV: 2010-2015’ documents for the five sectors studied in this paper finds almost no references to external sources.

The most frequently cited source of information was ‘Formal field visits’, with 63% of officials stating that this was a key source of information. Discussions with frontline colleagues, and informal interactions with colleagues were the second and third most cited source of information, with 51.9% and 45.9% of officials stating their significance respectively. A similar pattern is observed restricting the selections to the top cited source of information for each individual: formal field visits are most frequently cited (22.3%),

> 16Only 4% of officials stated that one of their top three sources of information was not included in our survey options.

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