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

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.