The Social Bureaucrat: How Social Proximity Among Bureaucrats Affects Local Governance

Abstract: Most studies that examine subnational variations in public services associate low government performance with a lack of accountability. As distinct from these approaches, I offer a capacity-based explanation in which transaction costs associated with the production process of public services play the key role. Specifically, I argue that transaction costs within bureaucracy decrease with social proximity among bureaucrats –bureaucrats’ informal ties with other bureaucrats in their jurisdiction– because informal ties not only serve communication or socialization purposes but also provide channels for informal information exchange and cooperation. Testing the observable implications of this theory, I find that social proximity, as proxied by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. However, in line with theoretical expectations, geographic proximity is less likely to lead to high bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented community structures. Empirically, I show that the effect of geographic proximity is heterogeneous across provinces with different levels of social fragmentation as measured by network indicators. Six months of fieldwork in regions of Turkey with different political and ethnic geographies inform the descriptive inferences underlying the theory and its observable implications. I leverage a geographical regression discontinuity design to test my theory. My empirical tests employ novel administrative data from 30,000 villages and 970 districts in Turkey, geospatial indicators constructed using spatial analysis tools and satellite images, and antenna-level mobile call detail records. This study advances research on public goods provision by studying local public services outside of citizen-centered accountability explanations, instead revealing capacity-driven sources of government performance. By demonstrating that state capacity can vary systematically by the local social context, it also extends the literature on state capacity.