They are terribly far from the people

Russian officials remain a caste isolated from the outside world

Russian bureaucrats remain a closed caste, dedicated to their work, despite modest earnings, and negatively perceiving the outside world. The main conclusion made by the Institute of Urban Economics, which conducted a survey of officials: “employees are a separate group with specific characteristics, remote from the private sector and recipients of services.”

Officials highly assess the prestige of their work (three-quarters of those surveyed answered this way); the “average official” is a highly educated person with extensive professional experience. Few (only 4%) are considering the opportunity to go to work in a business, which, by the way, they have many complaints about. Thus, almost half of officials (47%) believe that business defends its private interests to the detriment of public ones. True, it is not entirely clear how exactly business should fight for state interests. It turns out that half of the officials initially have a negative attitude towards business. At the same time, two thirds of employees rarely communicate with recipients of government services or do not communicate at all. Thus, there is a wall between business and bureaucrats, which civil servants are not even going to overcome.

It is curious that 80% of respondents have a positive attitude towards the possible implementation of civil service reform. Especially representatives of the “younger” age group. “The more confident a person is, the more positive he is about the reform,” explained Anastasia Alexandrova, director of the Social Policy direction at the Institute of Urban Economics. However, as is again clear from the survey, first of all they expect to improve their financial situation through the reform. It is known without further questions that the performance of officials is assessed less than that of employees of private companies. But the survey showed that wages in the civil service are more than two times less than in the private sector.

Moreover, the higher the position, the greater the gap. Thus, leading economists in the public sector receive half the salary of their “private” counterparts, and managers receive a little more than a third. True, the social package of officials is one and a half to two times higher than that of employees of commercial companies. At the same time, the “private” social package is focused on ensuring the productive work of a healthy employee, while the “public” one is more like a form of social support. This probably explains the gender profile of Russian officials. The study showed that the civil service remains a “female” industry. Two thirds of civil servants are women. The average age of a civil servant is 41.5 years. True, this does not apply to the management level. Among managers there are one and a half times more men than women.

But these people are concerned not only with their own well-being. The collective consciousness of Russian officials is concerned about the results of their work. “Almost 80% of respondents believe that civil service reform and administrative reform are necessary. Half of them believe that the reforms will increase the efficiency of government agencies and the quality of public services, and 20% expect that the reforms will make the state and municipal service truly professional,” said Ms. Alexandrova. However, the results of the reform, if it is carried out after all, are not assessed so positively by them. No more than half of the respondents believe in the success of the reform, and every fifth found it difficult to answer the question whether the civil service reform can be successful.

During the study, 880 state and municipal employees of various ranks were interviewed in eight constituent entities of the federation, including in the regions where an experiment in reforming the civil service is being conducted - in the Samara, Saratov regions, Chuvashia, Krasnoyarsk Territory and St. Petersburg.

Vera SITNINA