Finally, these findings indicate that state-cadre bureaucrats are really important. If IAS officers are the steel frame of the Indian state, state-cadre bureaucrats are the bricks and glass.

Full paper as a preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

This cannot be done by order. It is a labour-intensive task, taking place beyond formal settings like review meetings, and often includes symbolic acts and trust-building actions. I base this on around 40 interviews with public managers in Bihar and Karnataka.

I argue that the task of a public manager in this case is to increase mutual expectations about effort levels, and increasing these mutual expectations hinges on a public manager being able to persuade subordinates that their colleagues will reciprocate with higher effort.

Linking novel posting data with independent household surveys on learning across ten years, I show that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning.

Why?

Using the empirical case of rural 🇮🇳 and learning in public schools, I exploit an admin setup mimicking a natural experiment with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more opps for time-intensive persuasion.