Breaking Out of Low-Effort Traps: Bureaucratic Leadership by Persuasion

This paper tests if bureaucratic leadership impacts the quality of service provision of a difficult-to monitor task: learning in public schools. Using the empirical case of rural India, it exploits an administrative setup mimicking a natural experiment with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more ability to engage in time-intensive persuasion. Utilising blocked randomisation inference and bias-corrected variance decomposition on bureaucratic postings linked to independent learning data from household surveys across ten years, it shows that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning. Drawing on novel interview data, it illustrates how bureaucratic leaders can increase effort levels of subordinates through persuasion to overcome collective action problems rather than relying on orders and monitoring as principal-agent frameworks would suggest. The findings illustrate that for difficult-to monitor tasks managerial intensity and persistence trumps formal authority.