identification strategy, we find no systematic evidence of manipulation of election results by incumbents, and we show that turnovers are uncorrelated with a wide range of predetermined village characteristics.

We begin by highlighting three interrelated shifts triggered by electoral turnovers. First, personnel changes within village administrations result in higher staff morale and increased bureaucratic effort, as reflected in greater engagement with citizens. While the structure of village governments is set by law, new leaders can reshuffle personnel by reallocating staff across positions and encouraging some officials to step down to appoint others. We show that new leaders engage in more appointments, promotions, demotions, and reassignments. These changes translate into higher morale and effort after electoral transitions: bureaucrats report greater enthusiasm and interact more frequently with constituents, consistent with stronger bottom-up accountability.

Second, turnover reduces nepotistic appointments. The share of officials embedded in nepotistic networks declines after a turnover: new leaders are less likely to have relatives employed by the village, and bureaucrats are less likely to have a parent who served in the village government. This is consequential, as nepotistic appointments correlate negatively with service quality in our data. These shifts affect all bureaucrats. While new hires—who are less likely to be nepotistic appointees—show the largest gains in morale, long-standing bureaucrats drive the increase in citizen interactions. This pattern may reflect both selection and incentives: new leaders are more likely to retain high-performing bureaucrats, while longer-serving bureaucrats face stronger pressure to demonstrate their value to new village leaders.

Third, turnover improves information flows between bureaucrats and citizens, allowing village officials to better understand and act upon local preferences. After an electoral turnover, bureaucrats are more likely to identify which services citizens view as priorities or of lower quality and to report receiving complaints about those same services. Village heads, in turn, report taking action on these priorities. These effects extend to preferences expressed by citizens more socially distant from village officials, suggesting that improved information flows make policy more representative of the entire community. We illustrate these accountability dynamics by tracing the full causal chain from policy diagnosis to action for one public good: in villages with worse transport costs at baseline, a proxy for road quality, turnover increases the likelihood that bureaucrats recognize road deficiencies and report citizen complaints, and that village governments respond with road investments.

We next examine whether these shifts in bureaucratic processes and engagement improve the performance of village governments. Consistent with this, turnovers improve the quality of service provision, as measured in both administrative and survey data. Restricting attention to villages that held elections before 2021, the most recent year with administrative service-provision data, we find an increase of about 0.5 standard deviations in a standardized service index. This effect is driven by locally managed services such as garbage collection and street lighting. These gains appear only in villages where the head has no relatives employed in the village government, illustrating the role of declining bureaucratic nepotism as an important channel. They are also larger in villages whose last election occurred several years earlier (2015–2017) rather than more recently (2018–2020). Thus, the benefits of leader turnover may take time to materialize, perhaps because they must first offset the short-run disruptions associated with bureaucratic turnover, as in Akhtari et al. (2022).

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