The Global Survey of Public Servants: A Foundation for Research on Public Servants around the World

How do civil service management practices differ within and across governments? How do core attitudes of public servants—such as their motivation or satisfaction—differ within and across governments? Understanding how public
administrations around the world function and differ is crucial for strengthening their effectiveness. Most comparative measures of bureaucracy rely on surveys of experts, households, or firms, rather than directly questioning bureaucrats. Direct surveys of public officials enable governments to benchmark themselves and scholars to study comparative public administration and the state differently, based on micro-data from actors who experience government first-hand. This paper introduces the Global Survey of Public Servants, a global initiative to collect and harmonize large-scale, comparable survey data on public servants. The Global Survey of Public Servants can help scholars compare
public administrations around the world and understand the internal dynamics of governments, with the published Global Survey of Public Servants data freely available online.