Got proofs for new paper (w/ Devesh Kapur) coming out at the APSR on "The Political Economy of Bureaucratic Overload: Evidence from Rural Development Officials in India"! Short thread below for folks with interest in bureaucracy/state capacity 1/5.

Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wl39ck4re22pkaq/overloaded_bureaucrats_APSR.pdf?raw=1

With nationwide survey of local rural development officials in India, including time-usage diaries which measure daily behavior, we show that bureaucrats implement programs poorly when they are under-resourced and overloaded and can't allocate enough time to managerial tasks. 2/5

We link under-investment in local bureaucracy to absence of clarity of political responsibility for implementation due to decentralized political oversight and party fragmentation and test using GIS measures of differences in clarity of responsibility across admin units. 3/5

Apart from regression analyses, the most interesting data from the project were descriptive, including time-usage diaries and a text analysis of focus groups completed in over 130 districts. Officials often articulated the problem of bureaucratic overload in their own words. 4/5

Tldr: tho we often attribute bureaucratic under-performance to rent-seeking or political capture, often it stems from a political failure to invest adequately in local state capacity due to unclear political responsibility. Staff vacancy rate in offices we studied 40%+. 5/5