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If quantifying is “agreeing and then measuring”, a major difficulty for those interested in the size of the public service in a particular country is that there are not always real conventions about what a “civil servant” actually is. Adding a long-term perspective further complicates the task since, depending on political configurations and the means available to statistical agencies, both conventions and measurement modalities vary over time. So much so that historians are unable to accurately quantify the evolution of the “number of civil servants” in a country. How, then, can we envisage a comparative approach to variations in this number across several countries? This research note proposes a way around this difficulty by quantifying an abstraction: the perception of changes in the “number of civil servants” in the United States, France and the United Kingdom.