**Leader Selection.** Village governance may improve due to a selection channel: the challengers who win elections might be more able leaders than reelected incumbents, on average. We show here that such selection is unlikely to explain our findings.

In Appendix Table A.24, we examine how village head characteristics vary at the RD threshold. New leaders are no less likely than reelected incumbents to be connected to prior village leadership, including having a parent who previously served as village head (column 1) or as a member of the village government (column 2). Thus, electoral turnovers do not improve governance by selecting less connected leaders. These findings are consistent with qualitative accounts that village elections are often contested between rival families or clans, implying that challengers are not necessarily less likely to come from local elites (Aspinall and Rohman, 2017). At the same time, elected challengers may still outperform incumbents despite hailing from similar elite backgrounds, as a result of the “founder effect” described in George (2024).

We also find little evidence that elected challengers differ from reelected incumbents along observable characteristics: their age (column 3), gender (column 4), level of education (column 5), or language ability (column 7). The point estimate for religion (column 6) is negative and significant at the 10% level, which we interpret as a chance finding. Overall, the average leader in the control group is 49.9 years old, overwhelmingly likely to be male, and has completed 13 years of schooling, and none of these characteristics differs for elected challengers at the threshold. Similarly, we find no evidence that elected challengers differ from reelected incumbents in their enthusiasm (RD estimate = 0 _._ 043, p-value = 0 _._ 861) or motivation (RD estimate = _−_ 18 _._ 217, p-value = 0 _._ 257) for the job.

While our data shows no measurable differences between elected challengers and reelected incumbents at the RD threshold, it remains possible that challengers who won the most recent election are, on average, unobservably more competent than incumbents who secured reelection. Furthermore, if the gap in unobservable quality between elected challengers and elected incumbents is larger in close village elections than in typical elections outside our sample, then the findings we obtain in our sample of close elections may not generalize to other, less competitive elections.

To probe these concerns, we implement an empirical exercise designed to distinguish elections featuring less competent incumbents from those involving “unlucky incumbents” who faced adverse external circumstances as they competed for another term. Building on Marx et al. (2024), this approach identifies incumbents who faced a close reelection battle not mainly as a result of their poor past performance, but because of unfavorable external factors that created an electoral playing field hostile to incumbents, such as a natural disaster affecting the local community. Intuitively, natural disasters provide exogenous variation that reduces an incumbent’s reelection chances for reasons beyond their control. Using the administrative _Podes_ data, we identify a subsample of 242 villages that experienced a natural disaster—a major landslide, flood event, ocean tide, hurricane, or drought—during an incumbent’s term prior to the election observed in our data. In these elections, incumbents earned a vote share 6.5 p.p. lower on average, and they were 14 p.p. less likely to be reelected overall (Appendix Table A.25).<sup>14</sup>

> 14A stricter test would involve only considering natural disasters occurring the year of, or the year prior to an election. This would help rule out that an incumbent’s disaster response could also shift reelection probabilities. Unfortunately, sample size concerns prevent us from implementing this more stringent restriction, and we instead consider all disasters occurring in the

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