How do Americans perceive public servants?

Elizabeth Linos: There's a lot of negative rhetoric around government workers in the media and in politics, but what does the American public actually think? So here's the good news and the bad news. When we measured how Americans feel about public servants on four key dimensions, warmth, competence, integrity, and innovation. In general, the American public is pretty favorable to public servants. The bad news is that when you ask Americans to compare public sector workers to private sector workers on any dimension, they rate public servants less favorably than their private sector counterparts.

So we looked on average on how people perceive public servants, but we also realized that we make choices about what we call the people of government. Sometimes politicians or the media will call them bureaucrats. Sometimes they call them government employees or government workers or public servants. And we wanted to see whether or not these labels actually change not only who people are imagining on the other side, but also how they view them. And it turns out it really matters. So when we call the people of government bureaucrats or government employees, their favorability goes down pretty significantly compared to when we call them public servants. It's the same job, it's the same person in government, but the words matter and they change who we're imagining on the other side.

So even though in general, on average, Democrats view public servants much more favorably than Republicans, we see a lot of variation by occupation. So when we ask about firefighters, for example, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike have really favorable views about firefighters. And then for some occupations, we see pretty large political gaps. So for example, when we ask about election officials, Democrats view election officials as much more honest than Republicans. And the trend reverses for things like law enforcement, police officers, or ICE. In fact, for ICE agents, we see the largest gap in favorability between Democrats and Republicans.

We also thought it was critical to ask Americans whether they would consider a job in government to begin with. And what we find is that those perceptions of public servants correlate really strongly with whether or not someone would consider a job in government. What was particularly striking for me is that it turns out integrity is a really key component of that. So the strongest predictor of whether or not you would consider a job in government is whether or not you think of public servants as honest.

More than twenty two million people work in federal, state, and local government across the US, delivering services from trash collection to emergency preparedness. Yet despite the critical role that they play, we have very little systematic high quality evidence about their experiences at work and ultimately how to recruit, retain and support talent in government. And so we'll be launching Public Servant Pulse to better understand how they're doing on employee engagement and employee burnout and ultimately make sure that their voices are front and center in the debate about public service overall.