Traveling agents: Political change and bureaucratic turnover in India

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Traveling agents Political change and
bureaucratic turnover in India

• Lakshmi Iyer (Harvard Business School)
• Anandi Mani (Warwick University)
• IPES Conference
• November 2007

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Motivation

• Relationship between elected politicians and
  appointed bureaucrats large theoretical
  literature on normative and positive aspects, but
  relatively little empirical work, especially in a
  developing country context.
• Political interference in the bureaucracy is a
  major public policy concern in India Public
  Services Bill under consideration to further
  insulate bureaucrats from politicians.
• We use data from the Indian Administrative
  Service (top level of Indian bureaucracy).
  Politicians have very limited ability to hire and
  fire bureaucrats, so main margin of influence is
  changing which position the bureaucrat is
  assigned to. We thus look at the relationship
  between political events and whether a bureaucrat
  moves to a different post (Transfer).

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The Indian Administrative Service

• Successor to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) of
  colonial period. Top layer of Indian bureaucracy.
• All-India service i.e. officers appointed by
  the central government, but assigned to specific
  states gt potentially have multiple principals.
• Career bureaucrats, who occupy a range of
  positions district administration, state and
  central secretariats, state-owned enterprises.
• Recruited through examinations or promotion from
  State Civil Services (SCS).
• Constitutionally protected from dismissal or
  (formal) demotion by state governments, but are
  frequently transferred to different posts. We
  investigate whether political events change the
  frequency and pattern of bureaucrat transfers.

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Bureaucrat transfer data

• Complete career histories of all IAS officers in
  October 2005 (Ministry of Personnel website)
  officer characteristics and job details.
• Focus on 4149 officers in 19 major states 12
  female, 74 direct recruits, 32 of direct
  recruits serve in their home state. Time period
  1980-2004.
• Average time in any post is 16 months. Note that
  this has been a historical feature of the IAS.
• Construct transfer dummy for each officer in each
  year count multiple transfers as one. Mean of
  transfer dummy 0.49
• Transfer frequency varies across states and over
  time, but there is no secular trend in transfer
  frequency.

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Political change and bureaucratic transfers
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Regression specification

• State-level Regressions for mean transfers in
  state k and year t with state and year fixed
  effects
• MeanTransferkt ak bt cPolChangekt ekt
• District-level Regressions for transfer dummy in
  district d of state k and year t with district
  and year fixed effects, and interactions with
  district characteristics
• Transferdkt ad bt cPolChangekt
  dPolChangekt Xdt edkt
• All standard errors are clustered at the state
  level.
• Political events in Indian parliamentary system
  elections are scheduled every 5 years, but the
  Chief Minister of a state changes every 3 years
  on average (non-election related changes are
  usually due to within-party political infighting
  or due to coalition changes).

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Conclusions

• Bureaucrat turnover is significantly increased by
  politician changes. A change in the identity of
  the state Chief Minister (CM) results in an 8
  increase in transfers.
• This politician impact does not depend on the
  circumstances of attaining office or on the
  legislative strength of the CMs party.
• Bureaucrats and local politicians seem to be
  substitutes the CM transfers more bureaucrats
  in areas where he does not have political control
  ? a model with multiple agents might be better
  suited for this relationship.
• We do not find significant negative impacts of
  such politicized bureaucrat transfers on broad
  district level indicators of policy
  implementation and development outcomes (progress
  of immunization programs, completion of road
  projects, poverty reduction).