Ghatak, 2005). Nevertheless, new results are emerging. For example, Habyarimana, Khemani and Scot (2018) find that district bureaucracies in Uganda perform better at delivering public health services in places where locally elected politicians have higher integrity, measured using survey modules developed in psychology to assess moral disengagement. Case studies of Ugandan districts suggest that locally elected politicians can play both negative and positive roles in the delivery of services--interfering to obstruct versus monitoring to facilitate better services. The integrity of local politicians can be expected to matter in whether they obstruct or support technical officers in delivering services within the complex organization of local government. For example, if local politicians are colluding with health service providers to extract rents from the health facility, they may obstruct disciplinary action by district management. This is consistent with the Pakistan results cited just above, that doctors with connections to political leaders are more likely to be absent, and the public officials who manage these doctors are more likely to report political interference in their management.

Large sample, econometric evidence on channel (iii)--how politics shapes norms of behavior in bureaucracies--is even harder to gather because of problems with measuring norms, especially when it comes to norms of low-effort and low-motivation which respondents would not want to admit. Nevertheless, both empirical and theoretical research on this channel is also growing. For example, Pandey (2010) provides direct evidence linking historical institutions that shape norms to current political behavior and the delivery (or lack thereof) of public services. She takes advantage of historical variation across districts in India in colonial land revenue institutions which concentrated power among elite landlords. Landlord districts had more oppressive revenue systems that gave greater power to elite landlords rather than to peasants. In districts with nonlandlord control, village bodies that were more representative of peasants were responsible for collecting revenue. The results show that in ex-landlord-control districts, elections in contemporary times are more likely to be won by leaders belonging to high-caste groups, who are the social elite. These high-caste groups are less likely to send their children to the public schools in the villages compared with low-caste groups. Lower-caste children are overrepresented and high- and middle-caste children underrepresented in enrollment rates in public schools relative to their respective populations. Teacher effort is significantly lower in villages in ex-landlord districts. When results are analyzed by teacher caste, the difference in teacher effort between ex-landlord and ex-nonlandlord districts is significant for high- or midcaste teachers who would be considered elites (based on their caste status). For low-caste teachers, the difference in effort between ex-landlord and ex-nonlandlord areas is not significant. Finally, student test scores and school infrastructure are significantly worse in villages belonging to ex-landlord districts.

What the above example shows is that behavior varies a great deal across and within villages (between teachers of different castes) sharing the same formal political institutions of local democracy, as well as generally similar economic conditions. Furthermore, variation in these behaviors can be traced to historical institutions of colonial revenue administration and even 13