ceived training in the past 12 months (column 1), their ability to correctly answer a policy-relevant question about a recent regulation (an objective knowledge measure, column 2), and a standardized index of self-reported knowledge across five domains: development management and accountability, financial management, village regulations, drafting development plans, and the Village Law (column 3). We find no significant effects of electoral turnovers on these outcomes. Furthermore, bureaucrats serving new leaders may also be more skilled at securing government transfers. In Appendix Table A.13, we explore how turnovers impact transfers received by a subset of villages (423 out of 512) for which we could obtain administrative data on Village Funds Allocations (known by the Indonesian acronym ADD), a type of transfer allocated by district governments to fund staff salaries, benefits, and village operations. We find no evidence that turnovers affect the amount of ADD funds allocated or utilized (columns 1–2) or the share of funds spent (columns 3–4). These null effects mirror those we find on the budget amounts reported by village heads in our own survey data (column 5). Together, these results suggest that turnovers reshape bureaucratic organization without materially altering broader institutional know-how.

# **5 Impacts on Service Provision**

Our findings so far indicate that bureaucrats serving new village heads report higher enthusiasm, exert greater effort, and engage more frequently with citizens. This increased engagement helps them better understand community priorities, allowing village governments to respond more effectively to citizens’ demands. We hypothesize that these forces ultimately generate improvements in local service quality.

In this section, we first document effects of turnover on service provision in administrative data, as well as perceived service access and quality and actions taken by village governments to improve service provision, as measured in survey data. We examine the dynamic timing of these effects and we probe the robustness of these results. We then show that these gains are especially pronounced for socially distant citizens and in villages where turnover weakens nepotistic networks. Finally, we document their limited pass-through to citizen satisfaction and trust in the village government.

## **5.1 Service Provision in Administrative Data**

**Main Results.** Consistent with our findings on bureaucrat-level outcomes, turnover in village elections improves public service provision, as reflected in administrative _Podes_ data. For this analysis, we restrict the sample to villages that held their last election before 2021 (378 out of 512 villages), the year of the most recent _Podes_ survey. We construct a standardized index of service quality, encompassing all public goods managed by village governments: drinking water, sewage, garbage collection, street lighting, paved roads, public transit, kindergartens, primary schools, village maternity clinics ( _polindes_ ), and community health centers ( _puskesmas_ ). In Table 7, column 1, we find a substantial 0.50 standard deviation (s.d.) increase in this index of service provision at the RD cutoff (see also Figure 5, panel a). This effect is primarily driven by garbage collection, street lighting, and to a lesser extent, drinking water and public transit—Appendix Table A.14 reports RD estimates for each component.

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