Three Essays on Bureaucracy and Public Service Provision in Rural India

What explains variation in the quality of service provision and bureaucratic responsiveness across India's subnational units despite both policy content and formal organisational structures being constant? By analysing outcome and survey data across hundreds of India's rural districts and blocks, this PhD project aims to disentangle the role of individual mid-level bureaucrats, subnational bureaucratic units, and the surrounding social and political environment in shaping subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness. Through a combination of causal inference based on cross-sectional outcome data, variance decomposition exercises exploiting the movement of bureaucrats over time, novel interview data based on fieldwork across two states in India, and a larger scale survey in one major Indian state (Bihar) covering those administrative levels tasked with policy implementation, it sheds light on how subnational state effectiveness and responsiveness to citizens' demands are shaped by mid-level bureaucrats, their identities, and the management practices they deploy. These bureaucrats, despite playing a central role in managing India's frontline personnel from teachers to health workers, have seen little systematic attention in the literature but their (in)actions matter for public service provision. Providing evidence showing that mid-level bureaucrats matter and supporting this with novel insights on how and why they impact service provision can support policymakers in reforming and improving the quality of services a large share of India's citizens relies on.