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How the States Grow. Seeing and Counting Civil Servants in France, the United States and the United Kingdom

This research project proposes a new approach to the development of States through a reconstruction of the evolution of their workforce. Approaching public employment from a long-term comparative perspective has hitherto come up against a major obstacle: the contours and methods of counting vary from one country to another and are not stable over time. ‘How the States Grow’ invites us to consider this diversity as an object of investigation in its own right.
Analysing the production and circulation of data on public employment across four main fields (statistical, media, political and scientific) will provide a new reading of the transformations of States over the long term. The aim of this approach is not simply to correct the biased data of the past, but to take into account all the figures that contemporaries considered valid for the uses they wished to make of them. Even when a retrospective look might lead one to deem them fanciful. In short, the aim is to use all the available data to reconstruct and offer a visual representation of contemporary perceptions of the abstraction ‘number of civil servants’.
Funded by the Scientific Advisory Board for 2022-2024, this research will initially focus on the United States, France and the United Kingdom, with the aim of laying the foundations for an extension to other countries. The project will lead to the creation of an open database and a platform for visualising changes in the number of long-term public employees.