The Uneven State
Why do some places experience better governance compared to others? Explaining the unevenness in the terrain of the state has been a central endeavor for social science research. Regions with poorer quality of governance often continue to lag behind while other regions progress, creating disparities that fuel grievances and limit the quality of democratic participation. Spatial disparities in governance are often seen as a result of strategic political actions of a centralized planner, local elites, or historical processes that shape the quality of local institutions.
In this book, I argue that the preferences of mid-level bureaucrats who are regularly transferred across the territory of the state play a central role in reinforcing regional disparities in governance. Further, the macro-outcome of persistent regional disparities in governance does not flow directly from strategic shuffling of bureaucrats by politicians or rent-seeking motivations of bureaucrats but rather stems from mundane micromotives linked to preferences for a good post, one that is close to hometown or has good educational and healthcare facilities.
This book theorizes the role of the state as an organization in creating this wedge between mundane individual bureaucratic preferences and aggregate governance outcomes. Based on two years of fieldwork, granular administrative data, and an all-India survey of mid-level bureaucrats, the book examines how selection and transfer processes reinforce disparities in governance. The first part of the book focuses on the nature of bureaucratic preferences over transfers. Based on a unique dataset that tracks the transfers of Block Development Officers and Tehsildars over a decade in the state of Odisha, I capture the persistent lobbying efforts by bureaucrats to circumvent centralized orders assigning them to jurisdictions that do not align with their preferences.
The second part of the book links bureaucratic actions to the last-mile delivery of public services. I show that bureaucratic lobbying around transfers impacts a range of citizen-state interactions from welfare functions carried out by gram panchayats to the land bureaucracy’s responsiveness to citizens’ seeking certification of identity documents. The book opens the black box of the state and explains how politics within the organizational hierarchy of the state shapes its capacity to deliver public services.