Appendix Table A.11 reports robustness checks on bureaucrat–citizen alignment outcomes: removing controls, adding region fixed effects, including a third-degree polynomial in the running variable, varying the RD bandwidth, estimating the fuzzy RD, and removing villages with Suharto-era elites.

**Bureaucrat-Citizen Information Flows: Application to Roads.** Bureaucrats may invest in the services prioritized by citizens for at least two different, complementary reasons: because they have collected accurate information about what citizens want, and because they have gained better knowledge of service quality through direct observation. To probe these channels, we focus on one dimension of service quality—the quality of roads in the village—and examine the full causal chain going from the policy diagnosis to the relevant policy action. We find that both channels likely matter: in villages with high road quality, turnovers increase accurate perceptions of road quality among bureaucrats, while in villages with poor road quality, turnovers increase the likelihood that bureaucrats have heard citizens’ complaints about roads, and that the village government has taken relevant action on roads.

To perform this test, we measure baseline road quality using the 2014 _Podes_ survey. Road quality is proxied by an index of transportation costs (per km) to the subdistrict office and the regent or mayor’s office, where lower transportation costs indicate better road quality.<sup>9</sup> Table 6 splits villages into those with higher road quality (transportation costs below the sample median; panel A) and lower road quality (transportation costs above the sample median; panel B). This baseline measure of road quality is balanced at the RD threshold (Table 6, column 1). This balance is critical, as transportation costs may reflect a range of factors beyond village-level investment, including geography, remoteness, and highertier infrastructure. The RD design therefore isolates the effect of turnovers on bureaucratic decisions shaping road provision within the village’s purview, net of these confounding sources of variation.

In villages with high road quality, bureaucrats serving new leaders are more likely to accurately report that roads are in good condition, while in villages with poor road quality, they are more likely to accurately report worse quality (column 2). Thus, in both types of villages, turnovers improve bureaucratic knowledge of the state of local roads. In villages with high baseline road quality, turnovers have no effect on citizen complaints received about roads, while in villages with low road quality, bureaucrats have received more complaints about roads (column 3). Finally, turnovers increase the likelihood that village leaders have taken action on roads, but this is only the case in villages with poor road quality (column 4, panel B). Thus, turnovers increase the likelihood that bureaucrats have accurate perceptions of road quality, that they communicate effectively with citizens on the need to improve roads, and that this translates into relevant policy actions on roads by the village government—suggesting that overall, the flow of information about citizens’ preferences has improved in those villages, with meaningful consequences for local policy.

**Other Bureaucratic Knowledge.** The changes in bureaucratic organization and information flows that we document may be related to other knowledge acquisition, broadly defined, within the bureaucracy. Appendix Table A.12 examines this possibility by assessing three measures: whether bureaucrats re-

> 9We use transportation costs in IDR per kilometer as a proxy for baseline road quality rather than road type (asphalt roads vs. other roads), given the lack of meaningful variation in the latter measure.

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