before 2021) limits precision in some specifications, the estimated effects on service provision in the administrative data remain consistently positive and large, ranging from 0.28 to 0.68 s.d. increases in the overall index of public services. We also report the fuzzy RD estimate, which yields a similar result with slightly larger magnitude. Columns 2–4 present analogous robustness checks for citizens’ perceptions of service access and quality as well as village governments taking action to improve services. We again find consistent evidence that turnovers improve perceived service access, quality, and village-level investments on service provision.

## **5.3 Downstream Effects on Attitudes**

Despite the improvements in service provision observed in both administrative and survey data, turnovers do not improve citizen satisfaction or trust in the village government. Appendix Table A.23 shows that this finding holds in the full sample (panel A) and across subsamples of citizens who are more or less socially distant from the village government (panels B through D). Consistent with bureaucrats’ reports (see Table 3), citizens overall indicate more frequent interactions with bureaucrats after a turnover (column 1, though not statistically significant). However, they do not express greater satisfaction with the village government (column 2) or higher trust in it (column 3). Panels B through D show that less socially distant individuals are driving the increase in bureaucrat–citizen interactions after a turnover, while changes in trust towards the village government do not vary substantially between citizens at varying degrees of social distance.

Overall, these null effects on attitudes—despite significant gains in service provision—suggest that citizens may not immediately recognize or attribute these improvements to the village government, limiting short-run gains in trust or satisfaction. Improvements in service provision may be misattributed to other actors, such as higher levels of government or foreign donors (Cruz and Schneider, 2017; Guiteras and Mobarak, 2015), or trust may adjust only slowly to new information (Khan et al., 2021). In addition, our broad measures of trust and satisfaction may not fully capture welfare gains from improvements in specific services. While administrative data and citizen surveys point to meaningful gains in service access and quality (Table 7, columns 2–3), attitudes toward the village government may reflect additional considerations, including fairness, expectations, and experiences beyond local service delivery. This disconnect is also consistent with rising expectations following turnover, which may offset the effects of improved service provision on reported satisfaction.

# **6 Alternative Explanations**

Our results show that turnover in village elections shakes up village bureaucracies, fosters increased engagement and policy alignment between bureaucrats and citizens, and improves service provision. In this section, we discuss potential explanations for the shifts in bureaucratic organization and improvements in service quality that we observe. We focus on four possible explanations: positive selection of new leaders, lame-duck village heads driving down bureaucratic effort, patronage appointments by newly elected leaders, and social desirability bias in survey data collected from bureaucrats.

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