Bureaucrats and Politicians: How Does Electoral Competition Affect Bureaucratic Performance? ∗

This paper examines two competing mechanisms by which electoral competition af-fects bureaucrats ’ performance: re-election concerns and dynamic incentives. Incumbent politicians in competitive constituencies have higher re-election concerns. This gives them a greater incentive to monitor their bureaucrats, resulting in faster project execution. On the other hand, politicians in low competition constituencies have a high probability of being re-elected and therefore typically have longer tenures. This gives them the ability to motivate bureaucrats to work harder using long term incentives. To isolate these alter-native mechanisms empirically, a unique dataset from India is constructed by matching details of bureaucrats ’ work histories with individual local public good projects under the Member of Parliament Local Area Development scheme. The fact that administrative and electoral boundaries do not perfectly overlap is exploited to show that the same bureaucrat approves projects faster for the politician whose probability of winning is higher. More-over, bureaucrats perform better when they are up for promotion and when they know that the politician is likely to be in office at the time of promotion. These findings sugges