The data for this study were collected in a national survey of civil servants at the Swissmunicipal level. Switzerland has 2636 municipalities as of 1 January 2009. In the Germanand French-speaking areas, 1736 municipalities were contacted by mail inviting them to take part in a national survey on the motivation of Swiss public servants. This means that apart from the municipalities in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, virtually all Swiss municipalities were addressed. In order to raise the level of participation, the municipal authorities were promised a standardized benchmark report containing the survey’s key results. A total of 279 municipalities participated in the survey. Depending on their preferences, the survey was administered online or on paper. The municipalities were responsible for the distribution of the questionnaire to the civil servants and also for reporting back to the authors the number of people who received the questionnaire. This information was important for accurately determining the response rate. With respect to Swiss municipalities, the main activities are mostly operational in the sense that municipalities have to implement public policies rather than to conceptualize them. In other words, public servants working in Swiss municipalities are doing operational tasks and are in frequent contact with citizens/customers.
The survey was given to 9852 civil servants and 3754 questionnaires were returned, yielding a response rate of 38.1 per cent. Men represented 54.4 per cent and women 45.6 per cent (see table 1). The average age was 43 years. The great majority of participants had either a professional apprenticeship (44.1 per cent) or held a college or university degree (39.3 per cent). The sample includes employees from different hierarchical levels and with
different job tasks. In terms of the separation of the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, an adequate measure of this is the respondents’ survey language. About 79.0 per cent of the respondents used the German questionnaire and 21 per cent used the French version. The latter corresponds approximately to data from 2000 about the relative distribution of languages among all inhabitants in Switzerland: 65 per cent were Germanand20 per cent were French-speaking [Source: Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland]. Concerning the language of municipal employees, no accurate data is available. Lastly, not all of the 3754 respondents answered every question in the survey. For the regression analysis, missing data was treated with the pairwise deletion method.