Tuğba Bozçağa

My next major project, which will be an extension of my first dissertation paper, will be a book project and focus on the following questions: how do bureaucrats’ ties with each other vary across different social contexts, and what are the implications of this for state capacity and government performance in public services? The core argument of the book is that informal ties among bureaucrats create positive externalities that reduce the transaction costs commonly seen in local governance and increase bureaucratic efficiency. The book will test two major implications of this theory: i) we should observe high bureaucratic efficiency in contexts with high social proximity between bureaucrats, and ii) we should see lower bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented districts because social fragmentation makes it more difficult to establish social ties and reduces the reachability of any given individual in the community, including bureaucrats. 

I will examine the roots of bureaucratic efficiency in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country characterized by a centralized state structure, which will allow me to examine a diverse set of community structures with varied sectarian, ethnic, and political compositions as well as to rule out potential alternative explanations such as inequalities in government resources, commonly seen in federal systems. The empirical analyses in the book will employ quasi-experimental designs; geocoded data from tens of thousands of villages, schools, and health infrastructure projects in Turkey; and satellite, network, and original administrative data at the district level. 

The book will be divided into five main parts. First, I will present the theoretical framework that links social proximity to bureaucratic transaction costs, which stem from informational asymmetries and weak enforcement (e.g., opportunistic behavior, allocative inefficiency, red tape and time costs), and bureaucratic efficiency. Second, I will illustrate each step of the theoretical framework developed in the preceding chapter, drawing on over 170 structured interviews (including closed-ended questions) conducted with officials in more than 6 months of fieldwork across Turkey. The third chapter will present the empirical evidence for the first key implication of the theory: social proximity between bureaucrats, as captured by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. The fourth chapter will present evidence for the second testable implication of the theory by demonstrating that bureaucratic efficiency is likely to decrease in socially fragmented community structures, with a focus on network measures and the ethnic, sectarian, and hometown composition of districts. Finally, the fifth chapter will explain the comparative implications of the theory by discussing how the (positive) impact of lessening bureaucratic transaction costs vary across space and across different types of public goods.