Where we do see evidence of influence is in the implementation process. For each project, I coded what proportion of funds were warranted (released by the Ministry of Finance to be used by implementing organizations) in the first two quarters of the fiscal year (which in Nigeria coincides with the calendar year). The greater the amount warranted in the first two quarters, the more funds are available early on in the project cycle. Since all projects were designed to be implemented over a single year, this is a substantial shift in resource availability. Column 5 of Table 4 presents the results of a regression of the form of (3) but where the dependent variable is the proportion of funds warranted in the first half of the year. Membership of a committee coincides with an 8 percentage point increase in the proportion of funds warranted. The coefficient has a p-value of 0.03 and corresponds to a 13 percent increase in fund availability in the first half of the year.

The size of the coefficient in Column 5 of Table 4 is close to the percentage point increase in completion in Column 1 of Table 3. The results are consistent with politicians pushing bureaucrats to prioritize the release of funds to projects in their constituency, and at least some of this being used for project implementation. This is supportive of the budget control literature (Carpenter, 1996) that argues that congressional committees use power over the budget to influence agency actions. These results add to the existing literature to show that budgetary influence by congressional committees goes beyond appropriation to disbursement. We will now turn to what public officials state congressional politicians pressure them to do with these additional funds.

# **4.3 Consequences of Formal Power for the Political Equilibrium**

Sections 4.1 and 4.2 provide evidence that progress in the implementation of public projects across the Nigerian Federal Government is a function of the power wielded by politicians. I now turn to how committee power impacts the political environment surrounding the implementation of a public project, and the nature of political intervention in the bureaucracy.

Table 5 presents estimates of the impacts of formal power on informal engagements with the bureaucrats who implement the public projects we study using a modified version of regression (3). The analysis continues to be at the project level, and the dependent variable is now the proportion of public officials at the organization implementing the project that state intervention or engagement with members of the political or bureaucratic elites. Since the projects are a representative set of federally funded small-scale infrastructure, they provide an appropriate weighting across organizations of the intensity of interaction by politicians with the bureaucracy. We include the broad range of constituency controls described above to account for any differences in the socio-economic environment.<sup>29</sup> Politicians with and without committee powers have the option of engaging directly with the bureaucracy outside of the formal committee channels. They may do so to provide bureaucrats with informal incentives to act on constituency projects, and there is evidence from the survey of civil servants that this happens frequently. Federal bureaucrats state that they engage personally with politicians on 14 percent of projects that they implement. Committee members formally engage with senior members of organizations in their sector, reducing the need to directly engage with the wider body of bureaucrats below those senior levels.

Across Table 5, we see evidence that providing exogenous formal power to politicians changes the implementation environment by shifting the engagements with bureaucrats of a range of actors related to project completion. We see that _direct_ intervention by political actors in general (so outside of the

> 29To assess whether different sectors are operating in different socio-economic environments, I generate a balance table of constituency characteristics across sectors. There is no clear evidence of different sectors operating in systematically contexts.

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