Martin HausPhD candidate
(on the job market) Department of Government London School of Economics |
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My primary research interests concern bureaucracies, service delivery, and the political economy in low- and middle-income countries with a particular focus on state capabilities and management practices within the public sector.
My doctoral project focuses on bureaucracy and public service provision in India. By analysing outcome and survey data across hundreds of India’s rural districts and blocks, this PhD project aims to disentangle the role of individual mid-level bureaucrats, subnational bureaucratic units, and the surrounding social and political environment in shaping subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness. Through a combination of causal inference based on cross-sectional outcome data, variance decomposition exercises exploiting the movement of bureaucrats over time, novel interview data based on fieldwork across two states in India, and a larger scale survey in one major Indian state (Bihar) covering those administrative levels tasked with policy implementation, I shed light on how subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness to citizens’ demands are shaped by mid-level bureaucrats, their identities, and the management practices they deploy. These bureaucrats, despite playing a central role in managing India’s frontline personnel from teachers to health workers, have seen little systematic attention in the literature but their (in)actions matter for public service provision. Providing evidence showing that mid-level bureaucrats matter and supporting this with novel insights on how and why they impact service provision can support policymakers in reforming and improving the quality of services a large share of India’s citizens relies on. My research uses both, quantitative and qualitative methods with an emphasis on causal inference. I have presented preliminary results at various international conferences including EPSA, PMRC, GLD, and King's Business School.
Together with Dan Berliner (LSE) and Ashmita Gupta (ADRI), I have been part of the ISPF-funded project "State Effectiveness, Bureaucratic Management Practices, and Citizen-State Interaction in India" conducted in 2024-2025. We currently analyse data from this survey and dissemination events are in the planning phase.
I further held consultancy roles with the International Budget Partnership and the World Bank Group.
I also have teaching experience at the UG level and have been GTA for LSE's Executive Master programme for the course on Fiscal Governance and Budgeting. In 2025, I have also been Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Public Policy at UCL where I taught the master's course on Public Management: Theories and Innovations. I further hold the Head Tutor role for LSE's Online Certificate Course on Public Policy Transformation: AI, Innovation, and Technology.
Before starting my PhD I obtained an MSc in Development Studies at the LSE.
In my free time, I am also co-leading Nitya Bal Vikas Deutschland e. V., a German charitable organisation that I co-founded in 2015. We support civil society efforts in India.
You can download my CV here.
If you would like to get in touch, please write to m [dot] haus [at] lse.ac.uk or follow me on twitter @martinhaus93.
My doctoral project focuses on bureaucracy and public service provision in India. By analysing outcome and survey data across hundreds of India’s rural districts and blocks, this PhD project aims to disentangle the role of individual mid-level bureaucrats, subnational bureaucratic units, and the surrounding social and political environment in shaping subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness. Through a combination of causal inference based on cross-sectional outcome data, variance decomposition exercises exploiting the movement of bureaucrats over time, novel interview data based on fieldwork across two states in India, and a larger scale survey in one major Indian state (Bihar) covering those administrative levels tasked with policy implementation, I shed light on how subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness to citizens’ demands are shaped by mid-level bureaucrats, their identities, and the management practices they deploy. These bureaucrats, despite playing a central role in managing India’s frontline personnel from teachers to health workers, have seen little systematic attention in the literature but their (in)actions matter for public service provision. Providing evidence showing that mid-level bureaucrats matter and supporting this with novel insights on how and why they impact service provision can support policymakers in reforming and improving the quality of services a large share of India’s citizens relies on. My research uses both, quantitative and qualitative methods with an emphasis on causal inference. I have presented preliminary results at various international conferences including EPSA, PMRC, GLD, and King's Business School.
Together with Dan Berliner (LSE) and Ashmita Gupta (ADRI), I have been part of the ISPF-funded project "State Effectiveness, Bureaucratic Management Practices, and Citizen-State Interaction in India" conducted in 2024-2025. We currently analyse data from this survey and dissemination events are in the planning phase.
I further held consultancy roles with the International Budget Partnership and the World Bank Group.
I also have teaching experience at the UG level and have been GTA for LSE's Executive Master programme for the course on Fiscal Governance and Budgeting. In 2025, I have also been Associate Lecturer (Teaching) in Public Policy at UCL where I taught the master's course on Public Management: Theories and Innovations. I further hold the Head Tutor role for LSE's Online Certificate Course on Public Policy Transformation: AI, Innovation, and Technology.
Before starting my PhD I obtained an MSc in Development Studies at the LSE.
In my free time, I am also co-leading Nitya Bal Vikas Deutschland e. V., a German charitable organisation that I co-founded in 2015. We support civil society efforts in India.
You can download my CV here.
If you would like to get in touch, please write to m [dot] haus [at] lse.ac.uk or follow me on twitter @martinhaus93.
