Civil Service Management and Bureaucratic Corruption: Evidence from a Cross-Country Survey of Public Employees

Numerous studies have linked economic, social, and institutional variables with corruption in government. Yet, most of this literature overlooks the management of public officials themselves. This is a relevant omission: almost all corrupt exchanges involve public officials. The few studies which do address this relationship focus on a narrow set of civil service management structures, linking meritocratic recruitment and, less robustly, pay levels with lower corruption. By contrast, how corruption relates to distinct promotion, pay structure (rather than levels), job stability and performance management designs – next to a host of other established public personnel management areas – remains largely unknown. This paper provides evidence to fill this gap. It does so by drawing on an original survey of public servants on their experience with civil service management in eight countries from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Our findings suggest that the effect of civil service management practices on corruption is, in part, country-specific and, in part, generalizable. Some practices curb corruption across several countries, while others do so only in specific country settings. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the sources of corruption, on the one hand, and the effects of civil service management practices on the other.