When do bureaucrats deliver effectively? This question is key to a state’s ability to fulfill essential tasks, such as the provision of public goods. It is also the centerpiece of a longstanding but vibrant scholarship on state capacity. Yet as the commonly used terminology of “compliance capacity,” betrays, most studies approach this as a question of deploying “sticks” (surveillance and sanctioning) and “carrots” (usually fiscal incentives or promotions) to induce bureaucratic compliance. Rooted in principal-agent theorizing, such rational choice models of bureaucratic motivation rose to prominence with US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “New Right” political agendas. They were subsequently embraced by international organizations like the World Bank and the OECD in the 1990s as part of “New Public Management” initiatives that sought to infuse private sector practices, and accompanying competitiveness, into public sector bureaucracies.
A large body of work now casts serious shadows on these strategies. (Dis)incentives tend to taper off over time; they require financial outlays and administrative capacity, both of which can be in short supply in the global South; and most dangerously, they can backfire by “crowding out” the intrinsic motivations of bureaucrats. In parallel, a growing scholarship is also exploring how shared identities, values, worldviews, and other sociocultural variables can shape bureaucrat performance.
Ashkay Mangla’s book Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India is a stellar contribution to this research on the “beyond rational” motivators for the performance of bureaucrats. Focusing on the largest primary education system in the world, catering to over 200 million children, Mangla makes a painstakingly researched, compellingly argued, and elegantly written case for how norms shape bureaucratic motivation in India.
As my own work explores, Indian states are characterized by stark variations in social development, including education outcomes (see Prerna Singh, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India, 2016). Where I emphasized how shared solidarities rooted in common, distinctive linguistic identities shaped the behavior of political elites (encouraging them to adopt progressive social policies) and citizens (motivating them to engage with the public services provided), Mangla focuses on how “the informal rules of the game” shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats who are at the forefront of policy implementation. The author deftly draws attention to the variation across the North-Central Indian heartland focusing on Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Bihar.
Mangla’s comparative field research is as wide-reaching as it is impressive. His study combines interviews with state officials; participant observation with local education bureaucracies; and interviews and focus group discussions with schoolteachers and citizens. Armed with a qualitative methods masterclass of an appendix, he convincingly demonstrates how variations in the normative framework in which bureaucrats are embedded influence the types of tasks they prioritize and the ways in which they engage with citizens, with significant consequences for education outcomes.
Exemplifying the nuanced and thoughtful theorizing that characterizes the book, Mangla distinguishes between types of norms (legalistic vs deliberative), on the one hand, and the complexity of administrative tasks in primary education, on the other. Legalistic norms encourage a rigid rule-based orientation. This approach of adhering closely to established procedures and hierarchies tends to be reserved for less complex educational tasks, notably enrollment and infrastructure provision. This “administrative-legal” strategy limits citizen engagement, undermining their ability to monitor and ensure the quality of schools. Deliberative norms, on the other hand, encourage a problem-solving approach, encouraging bureaucrats to be creative in their interpretation of policies and implementation of protocols, with an eye to centering local needs. They are emboldened to take on the “wicked” tasks of monitoring classroom teaching quality, providing academic support to teachers, and trouble-shooting citizen complaints.
Mangla’s book brims with contributions. It unpacks the “black box” of the state, while moving away from the dominant focus on “formal” to highlight the value of informal norms. The argument pushes back against the pejorative association of bureaucratic discretion with clientelism and corruption, showing instead how flexibility, creativity, and openness rather than bowing to rules and regulations can generate gains in education. Within the welcome move beyond “rational actor” understandings of bureaucratic behavior, Mangla departs from the more familiar emphasis on their pro-social motivations, offering instead a fresh perspective that centers institutional normative cultures.
The title of Mangla’s book is a nod to Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work (1993). Like Putnam’s, Mangla’s book is a piercing salvo against rationalist arguments. Putnam showcased how social capital, not socio-economic modernity, underlies differences in the democratic performance of Northern and Southern Italy. Mangla demonstrates that bureaucrats’ behavior is driven by norms rather than (dis)incentives that shift their strategic calculations. It has garnered critical acclaim and will serve as a beacon for future research. However, as was true for its namesake, the origin of its central explanatory variable raises some questions. Like Putnam, Mangla looks to history, delineating how norms are politically constructed during processes of state-building. Yet, in part because this discussion is spread across the empirical discussion of each case study state, the emergence and sustenance of the different types of norms feels theoretically underspecified.
A consolidated, theoretically focused analysis laying out the conditions that foster the development of legalistic or deliberative norms would have been useful. This could, for example, include a discussion of the differences in patterns of lower-caste mobilization or competition between the state and non-state actors, or between politicians and bureaucrats, factors that Mangla himself alludes to. Such a discussion is especially necessary because one of Mangla’s key arguments deals with fostering and safeguarding deliberative norms among frontline bureaucracies. Which leads into another question, also thoughtfully raised by another reviewer (Purohit). Insofar as Mangla’s account of norm-emergence is not specific to, should we expect it to extend beyond, frontline bureaucracies in education? Are places with legalistic or deliberative norms in the education bureaucracy also characterized by such norms in other departments? How would this then sit with the (often dramatic) variation in inter-sectoral performances within the same political-administrative structure? These however, are less critiques and more avenues for future research opened up by this outstanding book.
