Teacher Absence Falls Before Elections and Rises After Votes

Why This Question Matters

Public-sector worker absence is a persistent explanation for weak public service delivery in developing countries. Emmerich Davies asks whether changes in politicians' attention over the electoral cycle—rather than only bureaucratic capacity or resources—help explain why teachers in India miss work at varying rates.

Nationwide School Panel, 2006–2018

Davies assembles a panel of all schools across India from 2006 to 2018 and leverages an event-study design to trace how teacher absenteeism responds to the timing of elections. The analysis exploits within-school time variation around electoral dates to isolate patterns that align with politicians' incentive to secure votes.

What the Data Show

• Teacher absenteeism declines in the year before elections, when electoral incentives are most salient and political attention to local services intensifies.
• Absenteeism rises in the year after elections, consistent with a relaxation of electoral pressure.
• Comparable effects in the private school sector are inconsistent, strengthening the interpretation that the public-sector results reflect political control and accountability mechanisms rather than broad labor-market trends.

Mechanism: Politics, Principals, and Agents

Davies frames teachers and politicians as embedded in a dynamic principal–agent relationship: elected officials can increase monitoring or other forms of influence when elections loom, reducing absence, and reduce such oversight after contests. The asymmetric patterns between public and private schools support a channel in which electoral incentives shape bureaucratic performance.

Implications for Policy and Scholarship

These findings highlight a concrete way electoral incentives translate into service delivery: politicians' time-varying attention can improve accountability for public workers, at least temporarily. For policymakers, the results suggest that mechanisms that sustain monitoring and accountability beyond the campaign window could help reduce chronic absenteeism. For scholars, the paper links electoral behavior and public administration using national administrative data and a quasi-experimental event-study approach.