The magnitude of these effects is large relative to the existing literature.<sup>10</sup> Two features of our setting may help explain this large magnitude. First, village governments in Indonesia exercise considerable discretion over locally managed services, so leadership changes can have direct and immediate consequences for service delivery. Second, our index captures services such as garbage collection and street lighting, where substantial improvements may be achieved through relatively low-cost organizational changes rather than major capital investments. As a balance check, the last column of Table 7 presents the same service provision index from the 2014 _Podes_ wave, excluding garbage collection, which was not recorded that year (see also Figure 5, panel b). Prior to the most recent village head turnover, service provision was 0.06 s.d. lower (non-significant) in turnover villages.

**Heterogeneity by Nepotism.** Our findings align with qualitative evidence emphasizing the crucial role new village heads play in shaping local development outcomes.<sup>11</sup> In particular, the staff replacements and reduction in nepotism we observe may contribute to the emergence of more responsive local bureaucracies. Officials in turnover villages exert greater effort to engage with citizens and understand their priorities, fostering investments aligned with citizen preferences and ultimately improving service provision—an effect we observe in both administrative data and citizen surveys.

In Appendix Table A.15, we provide evidence that the positive effects of turnover are driven by villages where the electoral outcome disrupts nepotistic networks. An important caveat is that the measures of nepotism used to partition the sample are potentially endogenous. In columns 1–2, the split is based on whether the current village head employs a relative, which is itself directly affected by turnover (Table 4). Bearing this in mind, the improvements in service provision appear to only occur in villages where the village head does not employ a relative. In these villages, turnovers lead to a 0.77 s.d. increase in service provision (significant at the 5% level, column 1), while no improvement is observed when at least one bureaucrat is related to the village head (-0.069 s.d., not significant, column 2).

In columns 3–4 of Appendix Table A.15, we divide villages into those with no bureaucrats appointed before the last election who report having a parent who previously served as village official, and those with at least one such bureaucrat, respectively. This measure of nepotism is potentially less endogenous to the treatment (Appendix Table A.16 shows that it is not directly affected by electoral turnovers) and captures the persistence of family-based ties in village governance. The effect of turnovers on service provision is larger in villages without these long-serving nepotistic appointees (0.60 s.d., significant at the 5% level), though the difference between groups is not statistically significant. Together, these patterns suggest that dismantling nepotistic networks is associated with larger improvements in service provision, though caution is warranted given the potential endogeneity of the sample splits.

**Dynamic Effects.** In Appendix Table A.17, we show that improvements in service provision measured in _Podes_ take time to materialize after electoral turnovers. We group villages by the timing of their most recent election: 2015–17 (122 villages), 2018–20 (256 villages), and 2021–22 (134 villages). The staggered

> 10For comparison, Akhtari et al. (2022) find effects of bureaucratic turnover on educational outcomes in Brazil below 0.10 s.d., albeit in a setting with substantially higher baseline state capacity.

> 11A recent qualitative study of Indonesian villages (see Section 2) highlights that _“a responsive and reform-oriented village head can exercise considerable agency in ensuring a well-run village even without high levels of citizen demand”_ (World Bank, 2023, p.11).

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