Martin Haus

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. These insights can support policymakers in reforming and improving the quality of services a large share of India’s citizens relies on.

Breaking Out of Low-Effort Traps: Bureaucratic Leadership by Persuasion

This paper tests if bureaucratic leadership impacts the quality of service provision of a difficult-to-monitor task: learning in public schools. Using the empirical case of rural India, it exploits an administrative setup mimicking a natural experiment with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more ability to engage in time-intensive persuasion. Utilising blocked randomisation inference and bias-corrected variance decomposition on bureaucratic postings linked to independent learning data from household surveys across ten years, it shows that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning. Drawing on novel interview data, it illustrates how bureaucratic leaders can increase effort levels of subordinates through persuasion to overcome collective action problems rather than relying on orders and monitoring as principal-agent frameworks would suggest. The findings illustrate that for difficult-to-monitor tasks managerial intensity and persistence trump formal authority.

• Berliner, Daniel, Martin Haus and Joachim Wehner (2023): Do ministers matter for audit performance? Evidence from cabinet appointments during South Africa’s ‘State of Capture’. ODI working paper.
• Haus, Martin, Joachim Wehner, and Paolo de Renzio (2022): (When) Do Open Budgets Transform Lives? Progress and Next Steps in Fiscal Openness Research. Open Government Partnership.

• Professor Daniel Berliner
• Dr Sarah Brierley