Public service motivation and sectoral employment in Russia: New perspectives on the attraction vs. socialization debate

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that public service motivation (PSM) is higher among public sector employees, particularly in western countries. But whether these trends result from high-PSM individuals selecting into public sector employment or from on-the-job socialization remains subject to debate. We address this question utilizing novel panel data on Russian university students. Examining the relationships between PSM and sectoral employment both before and after students enter the labor force, we find that: (1) high-PSM students are more likely to prefer public sector employment; (2) high-PSM students are more likely to be employed in the public sector following graduation; and (3) PSM increases upon entry into the workplace at approximately the same rate in both the public and private sectors. These findings suggest that at least during early career stages, the association between PSM and public sector employment results largely from an attraction-selection process, rather than a socialization process. Our analyses additionally provide evidence that theories of PSM based on the western experience may generalize to the context of developing or post-communist countries, despite the prevalence of corruption and a less pronounced public service ethos in many of these countries.

Acknowledgments

We thank Evgeniia Mikriukova for outstanding research assistance and participants, Robert Christensen and James Perry in particular, in the Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business “Elevating Public Service Motivation” Conference, held September 25-28, 2019, for helpful insights and comments. This research was approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board (STU00202321) and the Higher School of Economics Commission for Ethical Evaluation of Empirical Research.

Notes

1 Important studies by Wright and Christensen (2010) and Ward (2014), considered in more detail in later sections, both employ panel data to track changes in PSM over time, but neither utilize data that facilitates comparisons of PSM both pre- and post- labor market entry.

2 As discussed below, we utilize the PSM scale developed by Kim et al. (2013).

3 Wright and Christensen’s (2010) analysis of panel data finds that US lawyers with high PSM did not necessarily select public sector employment for their first job, but were more likely to later be employed in the public sector in subsequent jobs. However, Wright and Christensen employ a measure of PSM from a survey wave that occurred only after respondents had entered the labor market.

4 Although we focus here on organizational socialization, other theoretical frameworks also provide foundations for understanding how such “reality shocks” could lead to a decline in PSM. For example, from the perspective of Self-Determination Theory, the failure of public sector organizations to fulfill individuals’ needs for autonomy, competence, or relatedness could potentially lead employees to seek motivation from extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors. Alternatively, from the perspective of other needs satisfaction models, if an individual pursues public service to satisfy a particular set of needs, then the motivational value of PSM may decrease as these needs are fulfilled (Deci and Ryan 2000, 230–231).

5 See Van der Wal (2015) for a review of studies focusing on PSM in non-western contexts, which shows that these works have focused primarily on Asia.

6 From 2016 through 2018, Russia ranked between 131^st and 138^th out of 180 countries evaluated by the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI). See www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview.

7 We adopted this recruiting approach because of concerns about the feasibility of recruiting a sufficient number of students, given that studies using student subject pools are relatively novel in Russia. For the same reason, we did not initially filter out students from non-social science departments. Once it became clear that we would easily meet our pre-registered recruitment targets, we limited the sample to social science students. Nevertheless, 4 percent of sample is from computer science and 4 percent from mathematics. All results presented below are robust if students from math and computer science are excluded.

8 Seventy-one participants responded to both the 2017 and 2018 waves, 146 to both the 2018 and 2019 waves, and 53 to all three follow-up surveys. When we received multiple responses, our analyses code employment using the latest data received. For analysis of sectoral employment, these coding decisions have minimal impact: only 5 respondents switched sectors between 2017 and 2018, only 9 between 2018 and 2019, and only 6 between 2017 and 2019. Our findings are robust to exclusion of these respondents from the analyses.

9 For the largest subgroup, the public administration students, the Moscow sample also appears relatively representative. Thirty-three percent of public administration students at the time of the study were male, compared to 32 percent of our sample. Forty-four percent of the public administration students were from regions outside of Moscow, compared to 42 percent in our sample.

10 Subjects also participated in experimental games designed for other studies, which we report in Gans-Morse et al. (2019) and Gans-Morse et al. (forthcoming). The experimental games employed incentive payments. On average participants in the Moscow study received the equivalent of approximately 14 USD and participants in the regional study received the equivalent of approximately 9 USD.

11 For both samples, the fit is improved if the COM dimension is excluded, but for the sake of comprehensively evaluating the relationship between PSM and sectoral employment preferences we retain all dimensions in our analyses. Our findings are qualitatively and quantitatively similar if we exclude the COM dimension.

12 The budget sector (budzhetnyi sector) in Russia refers to positions that are not part of the civil service (gosudarstvennaya sluzhba) but are financed and managed by the state.

13 As a robustness check, we also asked respondents to consider the distinction between the job they would prefer to have and the job they are most likely to have upon graduating. They were then asked to rate the likeliness of near-term employment in each of the previously stated career paths, again on a 1 to 7 scale. Results using this career expectations indicator are nearly identical to the results we present below using the career preferences indicator.

14 As with the other experimental games (see footnote 10), participants’ choices in the risk aversion exercise affected actual compensation for participation in the research.

15 The lack of findings related to gender in part reflects gender differences in preferences for different types of public sector careers. Male students in our study are more likely than females to seek federal or regional government jobs, but less likely to pursue budget sector jobs. Accordingly, these gender preferences appear to cancel out in the aggregated or dichotomous career preference measures. With respect to ability, when scores from the United State Exam (EGE), a standardized university entry test, are used in place of GPA, then higher scores are negatively correlated with a preference for the public sector. We use GPA in our primary analyses because not all students take the EGE, leading to a number of missing observations. Our results concerning PSM are robust regardless of which ability measure is employed.

16 A limitation of our data is that not all respondents in the 2019 survey wave took the time to complete the PSM index questions and, due largely to post-graduate studies, not all respondents were employed at the time of the follow-up survey. Accordingly, we are left with 223 observations for analyses comparing PSM levels in 2019 across sectors of employment. We show in Section C of the Online Appendix that results in Tables 5 are robust when reweighting the regression analyses to account for the probability that a respondent participated in later survey waves and answered the battery of survey items used to measure PSM.

17 The correlation in the public sector is the sum of the coefficients on the Years in Labor Market and the interaction term Public*Years: 0.087 – 0.103 = -0.016.

18 These figures are based on authors’ calculations using publicly available biographical data about top Russian officials.

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible in part by a grant from the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University, funded by the Rajawali Foundation in Indonesia, and was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.

Notes on contributors

Jordan Gans-Morse

Jordan Gans-Morse ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducts research on corruption, the rule of law, property rights, and political and economic transitions.

Alexander Kalgin

Alexander Kalgin ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor at the School of Politics and Governance, National Research University - Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He received his PhD in International Development from the University of Birmingham, and a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Manchester and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. His is interested in theory of bureaucracy, organizational studies and sociology of religion. His current research explores quasi-religious motivations in academia.

Andrei Klimenko

Andrey Klimenko ([email protected]) is a Head of School of Politics and Governance at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He received his PhD in Economics at the Moscow State University. His current research interests include institutional reforms in governance and smart regulation. He also is interested in performance management and public financial management.

Dmitriy Vorobyev

Dmitriy Vorobyev ([email protected]) is a senior researcher at the Laboratory for International and Regional Economy at the Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg, Russia) and a research associate at at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute (CERGE-EI, Prague, Czech Republic) and PRIGO University (Havirov, Czech Republic). He received his PhD in Economics at CERGE-EI. Currently he pursues research on political economy and public administration, primarily focusing on such issues as the role of information in political processes, efficiency of political institutions, and corruption, both theoretically and empirically.

Andrei Yakovlev

Andrei Yakovlev ([email protected]) is a Director of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies (IIMS) at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) and Professor at HSE School of Politics and Governance. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Economics and Statistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. His current research interests include political economy of reforms, public administration, industrial policy, and public procurement in Russia and other economies in transition.