PhD project
Three Essays on Bureaucracy and Public Service Provision in Rural India
What explains variation in the quality of service provision and bureaucratic responsiveness across India’s subnational units despite both policy content and formal organisational structures being constant? 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, it sheds 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.
Work in progress (draft available upon request)
The Local Bureaucrat: Between Capture and Responsiveness
Should bureaucrats be isolated from local capture or is being locally embedded conducive to the quality of public service provision? Exploiting a quasi-random assignment mechanism of members of the Indian Administrative Service, India’s elite civil service, this paper investigates the impact of local embeddedness on learning outcomes across public schools in rural Indian districts. The focus on learning in government schools has two novel aspects: first, it focuses on a difficult-to-monitor task; second, unlike infrastructure provision, it offers few patronage opportunities. I find a substantially and statistically significant impact of the share of local bureaucrats on learning that hinges on the literacy rate in the districts: for low literacy districts, a higher share of local bureaucrats lowers learning outcomes; for high literacy districts, a higher share increases learning outcomes. I find a similar pattern for the timely arrival of learning-related funds and no such effect on learning for private schools or infrastructure-related funds. Potential mechanisms explaining this contrasting effect are also discussed.
Presented at: EPSA, PMRC, GLD, LSE
Public Sector Leadership beyond Compliance: Evidence from Bureaucrats in Rural India
Mixed methods paper exploring the impact of elite vs non-elite bureaucrats on service delivery outcomes in rural India. I contrast principal-agent understandings and behavioural approaches to collective action for how public managers can overcome equilibria of mutually low expectations. Combines original interview data with Monte Carlo simulations to assess the impact of bureaucratic leadership.
Presented at LSE, King’s Business School
Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Citizen Claim-making: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in Bihar, India (with Ashmita Gupta and Dan Berliner)
How do government officials prioritise citizen complaints about local service provision? This paper presents the results of an in-person survey on state effectiveness that included a conjoint experiment with almost 400 managerial bureaucrats in Bihar, India.
Presented at London Public Policy Workshop, EPSA
Working Papers
Do ministers matter for audit performance? Evidence from cabinet appointments during South Africa’s ‘State of Capture’ (with Dan Berliner and Joachim Wehner)
Abstract: Do political leaders affect the audit performance of their organisations? A large literature aims to assess the impact of leaders in both private and public sector settings. Focusing on South Africa, we extend this work to ministers within central government by investigating whether and to what extent they are linked to the audit outcomes of their departments. These audits provide reliable, comparable and objective information on how well an organisation is run. Our empirical approach allows us to separate the role of individual leadership from underlying structural or organisational differences between departments, or time-specific factors. Despite strong audit oversight and institutionalised public financial management practices in South Africa that should serve to minimise individual leader effects, the majority of our empirical tests offer support to the claim that ‘ministers matter’ for audit performance. Leader effects are even stronger among departments involved in social and basic services than among other departments. These findings are robust across a large number of alternative modelling choices, and do not appear to be attributable to leadership transitions that are deliberately timed or targeted based on audit performance. Our study highlights the importance of political leadership for public financial governance, even in relatively highly institutionalised settings.
ODI working paper Panel Discussion at the Wits School of Governance
(When) Do Open Budgets Transform Lives? Progress and Next Steps in Fiscal Openness Research (with Joachim Wehner and Paolo de Renzio)
Background paper for the Skeptic’s Guide to Open Government (2022 Edition).
Full paper Summary on the IMF Public Financial Management Blog Background presentation
Non-academic articles (selection)
Three Essays on Bureaucracy and Public Service Provision in Rural India
What explains variation in the quality of service provision and bureaucratic responsiveness across India’s subnational units despite both policy content and formal organisational structures being constant? 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, it sheds 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.
Work in progress (draft available upon request)
The Local Bureaucrat: Between Capture and Responsiveness
Should bureaucrats be isolated from local capture or is being locally embedded conducive to the quality of public service provision? Exploiting a quasi-random assignment mechanism of members of the Indian Administrative Service, India’s elite civil service, this paper investigates the impact of local embeddedness on learning outcomes across public schools in rural Indian districts. The focus on learning in government schools has two novel aspects: first, it focuses on a difficult-to-monitor task; second, unlike infrastructure provision, it offers few patronage opportunities. I find a substantially and statistically significant impact of the share of local bureaucrats on learning that hinges on the literacy rate in the districts: for low literacy districts, a higher share of local bureaucrats lowers learning outcomes; for high literacy districts, a higher share increases learning outcomes. I find a similar pattern for the timely arrival of learning-related funds and no such effect on learning for private schools or infrastructure-related funds. Potential mechanisms explaining this contrasting effect are also discussed.
Presented at: EPSA, PMRC, GLD, LSE
Public Sector Leadership beyond Compliance: Evidence from Bureaucrats in Rural India
Mixed methods paper exploring the impact of elite vs non-elite bureaucrats on service delivery outcomes in rural India. I contrast principal-agent understandings and behavioural approaches to collective action for how public managers can overcome equilibria of mutually low expectations. Combines original interview data with Monte Carlo simulations to assess the impact of bureaucratic leadership.
Presented at LSE, King’s Business School
Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Citizen Claim-making: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in Bihar, India (with Ashmita Gupta and Dan Berliner)
How do government officials prioritise citizen complaints about local service provision? This paper presents the results of an in-person survey on state effectiveness that included a conjoint experiment with almost 400 managerial bureaucrats in Bihar, India.
Presented at London Public Policy Workshop, EPSA
Working Papers
Do ministers matter for audit performance? Evidence from cabinet appointments during South Africa’s ‘State of Capture’ (with Dan Berliner and Joachim Wehner)
Abstract: Do political leaders affect the audit performance of their organisations? A large literature aims to assess the impact of leaders in both private and public sector settings. Focusing on South Africa, we extend this work to ministers within central government by investigating whether and to what extent they are linked to the audit outcomes of their departments. These audits provide reliable, comparable and objective information on how well an organisation is run. Our empirical approach allows us to separate the role of individual leadership from underlying structural or organisational differences between departments, or time-specific factors. Despite strong audit oversight and institutionalised public financial management practices in South Africa that should serve to minimise individual leader effects, the majority of our empirical tests offer support to the claim that ‘ministers matter’ for audit performance. Leader effects are even stronger among departments involved in social and basic services than among other departments. These findings are robust across a large number of alternative modelling choices, and do not appear to be attributable to leadership transitions that are deliberately timed or targeted based on audit performance. Our study highlights the importance of political leadership for public financial governance, even in relatively highly institutionalised settings.
ODI working paper Panel Discussion at the Wits School of Governance
(When) Do Open Budgets Transform Lives? Progress and Next Steps in Fiscal Openness Research (with Joachim Wehner and Paolo de Renzio)
Background paper for the Skeptic’s Guide to Open Government (2022 Edition).
Full paper Summary on the IMF Public Financial Management Blog Background presentation
Non-academic articles (selection)
- The Hindu: The World Bank's STARS projects needs an overhaul (with Kiran Bhatty (CPR India); available here)
- Hindustan Times: Is the push for foundational numeracy and literacy pro-poor? (with Abhinav Ghosh (Harvard University); available here)
- The Wire: Why RCTs aren't the simple answer to solving India's learning crisis (with Rakesh K. Rajak; available here)
- Ideas for India: कोविड-19: संकटग्रस्त स्कूली शिक्षा और व्याप्त शैक्षणिक विषमता में अप्रत्याशित वृद्धि [COVID-19: Unprecedented increase of the schooling crisis and prevailing educational disparity] (with Abhishek Anand; available here)
