# **1 Introduction**

In decentralized democracies, citizens can periodically replace their local leaders through competitive elections. Officials elected at this level typically manage a small bureaucracy responsible for engaging with citizens and delivering services that respond to community needs. Often, these local leaders and bureaucracies enjoy considerable discretion in carrying out such responsibilities. While effective bureaucracies are key ingredients of state effectiveness (Besley et al., 2022; Finan et al., 2017), there is limited evidence on the consequences of turnover for bureaucratic performance in local governments.

Turnover can influence local governance through competing forces. Recent research highlights the disruptions caused by bureaucratic turnover following elections (Akhtari et al., 2022; Toral, 2024). Other studies examine the tradeoffs between merit-based and discretionary appointments in bureaucracies (Colonnelli et al., 2020; Moreira and P ́erez, 2024; Xu, 2018). This work suggests that turnover can cause instability, distort incentives, and undermine performance. At the same time, excessively rigid bureaucracies may develop a business-as-usual culture, struggle to attract new talent, and face organizational inertia. These dynamics may be especially pronounced in local administrations, where the pool of qualified bureaucrats is limited and leaders operate with minimal oversight, making such systems vulnerable to elite capture (Cruz et al., 2017). In these settings, local elections inducing changes in leadership could disrupt entrenched patronage networks and improve governance.

This paper explores how electoral turnover shapes bureaucratic performance. We focus on local governments in Indonesia, where village heads are elected every six years and wield significant executive authority. Indonesia has more than 75,000 rural villages where the local administration is often the first, if not the only, interface between citizens and the state. This setting is well suited to studying how leadership changes affect bureaucratic behavior and service delivery: bureaucrats operate under strong top-down and bottom-up pressures, since their tenure is highly contingent on local leadership and, as frontline providers, they are in regular contact with citizens.

Our analysis relies on data from a large survey that we conducted in 2022 with village heads, bureaucrats, and citizens in 852 villages spanning 17 provinces across Indonesia. We designed this survey to collect rich data on bureaucrats’ characteristics and citizens’ attitudes, and to understand how the policy priorities of village officials align with the preferences of citizens. We also use detailed administrative records on village-level public goods provision. Together, these data sources allow us to study what citizens want from their village government, what bureaucrats know about these preferences, and how they act upon them. To our knowledge, this paper is among the first to study bureaucratic performance from the dual perspective of bureaucrats and the citizens they serve.

Using this dataset, we employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) leveraging variation from close village elections where the incumbent narrowly won or lost. Incumbency plays a central role in shaping electoral competition in this context since village elections are non-partisan by law. Across the 852 villages we surveyed, 512 conducted an election featuring an incumbent between 2015 and 2022. Incumbents won a slight majority (52%) of these elections, allowing us to identify the effects of turnovers on village- and individual-level outcomes. We also use variation from the staggered timing of village elections inherited from Indonesia’s democratic transition (Martinez-Bravo et al., 2017). Supporting our 1