It Takes a Village Election: Turnover and Performance in Local Bureaucracies

Samuel Bazzi, Masyhur Hilmy, Benjamin Marx, Mahvish Shaukat and Andreas Stegmann

No 33533, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and inaction, often perpetuated by entrenched elites. This paper examines how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance. Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large sample of Indonesian villages, we show that electoral turnover revitalizes local bureaucracies and improves the flow of information about citizen preferences. Bureaucrats serving new leaders interact more with citizens and are less connected to past or present village officials, resulting in a more responsive village government that better incorporates citizens’ demands in policy-making. This improves local service provision, as measured in both administrative data and citizen surveys. Overall, our findings suggest that leadership turnover can mitigate elite capture and improve governance in local administrations.

JEL-codes: D73 H41 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea and nep-ure
Note: DEV POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33533.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: It Takes a Village Election: Turnover and Performance in Local Bureaucracies (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33533

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33533
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().