# **B Data Appendix: Details on Survey Design**

We conducted a survey of village officials and citizens in Indonesia between March and August 2022, in partnership with the Indonesian Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) and the World Bank. The survey took place in 852 villages spread across 23 districts in 17 provinces. The primary targets were active village officials as well as 8 to 12 adult citizens residing in the same villages. The survey aimed to gain a better understanding of village governance and to provide a new window into the level of village development as perceived by both officials and citizens. As a result of the restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, we conducted all surveys over the phone. Below, we describe the sampling procedures we used to select villages, village officials, and citizens.

## **B.1 Sampling of villages**

We constructed a large representative sample of villages spanning each of Indonesia’s major islands. Since the survey was designed as the baseline of a future digital training intervention, this sample was restricted to districts with relatively high internet coverage. We first randomly selected districts after stratifying by region, and then randomly selected a fixed proportion of villages within each district.

Our initial goal was to recruit a sample of 1,000 villages from a set of eligible villages in 20 districts. Given surveys were conducted over the phone, we expected a low consent rate. We thus sampled from a pool of around 1,700 villages across 20 districts and later added another 3 districts in order to reach a final target sample of 1,000 villages. Among these, we were able to administer the survey in 852 villages spread across the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara (NT), Kalimantan, and Sulawesi.

Contact details for village heads and BPD chairpersons were obtained directly from MoHA. We started data collection by conducting a listing process to verify these phone numbers, obtaining village heads’ consent. If a village was successfully listed, the survey team would proceed to interviews of village officials. We then marked the village as a “completed listing” once it had been confirmed that the village head’s phone number could be called, and they had consented to be interviewed. This listing process resulted in a total of 865 villages in the final sample, consisting of 856 completed listing villages, 8 partially completed listing villages, and 1 incomplete listing village. Of these 865 villages, 852 villages were marked as “completed interviews”, meaning we successfully completed the target number of interviews with village officials and citizens.

## **B.2 Sampling of village officials**

In each village, we aimed to conduct interviews with the village head ( _kepala desa_ ), the village secretary ( _sekretaris desa_ ), the BPD chairperson ( _ketua BPD_ ), one randomly selected member of the village bureaucracy, one randomly selected neighborhood/hamlet head ( _kepala dusun_ ), and one randomly selected BPD member ( _anggota BPD_ ). Phone numbers of village officials were obtained from the village heads themselves, or alternatively from the BPD chairperson if the village head could not be reached. Our sample size reached a total of 744 village heads, 864 BPD chairpersons, and 3,606 other village officials, including 1,793 village bureaucrats (members of the village secretariat).

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