Trust or Control? Mid-level bureaucratic dynamics and the quality of education provision in India's Districts

总结（不超过500字）发展中国家如何提高公共服务质量？更严格的控制还是更多的自主权和信任有利于服务质量？难以监控的任务，即“执行密集型”的厚任务（Pritchett, 2014），而不仅仅是后勤任务，对防止官僚逃避的努力构成挑战，并且需要与薄任务不同的问责制（Andrews， Pritchett和Woolcock， 2017）。那些遵循新公共管理（NPM）范式及其变体的人主张定量目标，货币激励，密切监督和通过创建私人选择更容易退出（Fukuyama, 2013）。那些质疑这一范式的人指出，官僚机构的成功之处在于，官僚机构利用非正式渠道为公众利益服务，即使在无人监督的情况下也不逃避，尽管缺乏金钱激励，但仍表现出高度的团队精神。在教育领域，近年来出现了一种从学校数量转向儿童学习多少的转变。因此，分析的重点已经从易于观察和监控的单薄任务（例如，是否建立了一所学校？）转移到难以监控的厚任务（例如，分布在2万所小学的10万名教师是否使儿童参与学习？）。初步研究问题包括：1。地区级官僚的地方嵌入性是否有助于提高学校教育质量？2. 接触高质量的地区官僚机构是否会影响官僚日后的表现？3. 当正异常值存在时，哪种方法能更好地解释它们产生或运行的过程？以下工作假设将被检验：1。局部嵌入有利于官僚绩效，对于厚任务比薄任务更为重要2。接触高质量的官僚机构会在有限的时间内改变官僚的偏好。隐藏的积极异常值可以通过自治和信任而不是更严格的控制来更好地解释。拟议的博士旨在通过分析印度数百个地区的面板数据来回答控制或信任和自治是否有利于教育质量。它的目的是促进关于改革公共服务以确保公民实现其权利的更大辩论。为此，将使用混合方法方法，包括大n统计分析以及深入的定性工作。

Summary (no more than 500 words) How can public service quality be improved in developing countries? Is tighter control or more autonomy and trust conducive to service quality? Difficult-to-monitor tasks, i.e. thick tasks that are "implementation intensive" (Pritchett, 2014) and not solely logistical, pose a challenge to efforts preventing bureaucrats from shirking and require different accountability systems than thin tasks (Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, 2017). Those following the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm and its variations argue for quantitative targets, monetary incentives, close surveillance and easier exit by creating private options (Fukuyama, 2013). Those questioning this paradigm point out the successes of bureaucracies where bureaucrats are using informal channels in the public interest, do not shirk even when not watched and show a high esprit de corps despite a lack of monetary incentives. In the field of education, there has been a shift in recent years away from the quantity of schools built towards how much children learn. Thus, the focus of analysis has moved from thin tasks that are easy to observe and monitor (e.g. has a school been built?) to thick tasks that are difficult to monitor (e.g. do one hundred thousand teachers distributed across twenty thousand primary schools engage children in learning?). Preliminary research questions include:1. Is local embeddedness of District-level bureaucrats conducive to the quality of school education? 2. Does exposure to high-quality District bureaucracies influence the performance of bureaucrats in later postings? 3. Where positive outliers exist, which approach better explains the processes by which they came to be or operate? The following working hypotheses will be tested:1. Local embeddedness is conducive to bureaucratic performance and even more crucial for thick tasks than thin tasks 2. Exposure to high-quality bureaucracies changes bureaucrats' preferences for a limited amount of time 3. Hidden positive outliers can better be explained by autonomy and trust rather than tighter control The proposed PhD aims to answer whether control or trust and autonomy are conducive to the quality of education by analyzing panel data on several hundred of India's Districts. It aims to contribute to the larger debate on reforming public services to ensure that citizens get their rights fulfilled. To do so, a mixed methods approach will be used that includes large-N statistical analyses as well as in-depth qualitative work.