transit (column 7), but only the first of these estimates is statistically significant. Appendix Table A.19 shows that the effect on village governments taking action to improve services (Table 7, column 4) is also primarily driven by garbage collection (column 3).

**Heterogeneity by Social Proximity to the Bureaucracy.** Our sampling strategy allows us to explore the effects of turnovers on perceived service provision separately for citizens with varying degrees of social proximity to village officials. To construct our sample of citizens, we employed a snowball procedure in which respondents were asked to provide three contact persons whose names began with a randomly drawn letter of the alphabet. This procedure started with the village heads and BPD chairpersons and continued with citizen respondents until we reached the target sample size (8 to 12 citizens) in each village. As a result, our sample captures a spectrum of social distances from the village government: 30% of respondents are directly connected to a member of the administration, 25% have a second-degree connection (they were referred by a directly connected individual), and 45% have a third- or higher-degree connection. Importantly, social proximity to the village government does not change discontinuously at the RD cutoff, and the demographic characteristics of citizens are also balanced at the threshold.<sup>13</sup>

In Appendix Table A.20, we show that individuals more socially distant from the government are relatively younger and more likely to be women, less likely to be working and to have a tertiary education, and earn lower incomes on average. As expected, these individuals also interact less frequently with bureaucrats: in the control group, the standardized index of interaction frequency is 0.21 s.d. for citizens directly connected to the government, compared to -0.24 s.d. for those with three or more degrees of separation (see Appendix Table A.23).

Appendix Table A.21 shows that electoral turnovers lead to greater alignment between bureaucrats and citizens, including those with fewer social connections to village officials. In Section 4.3, we showed that turnovers improve bureaucrats’ understanding of citizens’ priorities. When we disaggregate these effects by social distance, we find that the gains in alignment are, if anything, more pronounced for citizens with weaker ties to village officials. In turnover villages, bureaucrats are more likely to identify investment priorities that align with socially distant citizens (columns 1–2) and to receive complaints about services prioritized by these citizens (columns 3–4). Additionally, village governments are more likely to act on the priorities of these most socially distant and marginalized constituents (columns 5–6).

Finally, socially distant citizens drive the improvements in perceptions of service access and quality following a turnover (columns 7–8). While turnovers improve perceptions across all subsamples, the largest and most precisely estimated gains (at the 1% level) occur among those least connected to the administration. Consistent with village bureaucracies becoming less beholden to local elites, these results suggest greater responsiveness to the preferences of more marginalized constituents.

**Robustness Checks.** Appendix Table A.22 reports robustness checks for the results in Table 7, including removing election-year dummies, adding region fixed effects, using a third-degree polynomial in the running variable, varying the RD bandwidth, and excluding villages with Suharto-era elites. In column 1, although the smaller administrative data sample ( _N_ =378 villages that held their last election

> 13See Appendix Table A.3 and Appendix Table A.4, discussed in Section 3.3.

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