Consistent with the figures discussed above, a recent qualitative study conducted across 18 Indonesian villages found widespread evidence of nepotism in village bureaucracies. These qualitative accounts suggest that nepotism may be central to understanding bureaucratic practice and performance: “As a result of considerable, albeit narrowing, discretionary powers of the village head, we found that the village bureaucracy is often made up of friends and, particularly, family members of the village head. In 8 of our 18 villages at least some ...village officials were related to the village head. Not surprisingly, the villages where officials were family members of the village head are also the villages with more unresponsive and factionalized village governments” (World Bank, 2023, p.17).

# **3 Empirical Framework**

This section describes the survey and administrative data we use, develops our empirical strategy, and validates the key assumptions underlying the regression discontinuity design.

## **3.1 Data**

We describe here the numerous sources of primary and secondary data on village governance, elections, and bureaucracies that underpin our empirical design.

**Survey of Village Officials and Citizens.** We conducted a large-scale survey of village officials and citizens in Indonesia between March and August 2022. The survey covered 852 villages across 23 districts in 17 provinces spanning the archipelago. Our sampling strategy focused on districts with good internet coverage and aimed to achieve broad national representativeness within this set. The primary targets were active village officials, including elected village heads, non-elected members of the village government, hamlet heads, and BPD chairpersons and representatives. In addition, we surveyed 8 to 12 adult citizens in each village. The survey aimed to inform the design of a future bureaucrat training intervention, to deepen our understanding of village governance, and to provide new insights into perceptions of village governance and development among officials and citizens. We collected perceptions of service access and quality, as well as priorities for future development spending, separately from citizens and officials. This allows us to study information flows from the former to the latter and to understand how knowledge of citizens’ preferences informs policy decisions.

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, all surveys were conducted by phone. We sampled citizens using a snowball procedure in which initial respondents (typically members of the village government) were asked to provide three contacts whose names began with a randomly drawn letter of the alphabet (see Appendix Figure B.2). This process continued until the target sample size was reached in each village. As a result, some citizens in our sample may be more connected to the village government than the average citizen. However, the extent of these connections does not vary discontinuously at the RD threshold and therefore does not represent a threat to our empirical strategy (see Appendix Table A.3).

Our survey covered a total of 744 village heads, 1,793 village bureaucrats, and 14,378 citizens. Restricting these figures to the 512 villages in which an incumbent candidate competed in the last election 6