committee channel) reduces (Column 1) as does general personal engagement by politicians with bureaucrats (Column 2). The probability of any politician intervening falls by 1.93 percentage points, or 13%, and the probability that bureaucrats at an organization implementing a ‘treated’ project report personal engagement with a politician falls by 3.34 percentage points, or 30%. The absolute reduction in reported engagement is largest at the level of the National Assembly (Column 3; 3.33 percentage points), as we would expect, but also reduces the intervention of state politicians (Column 4; 1.64 percentage points), who are perhaps acting on behalf of House representatives. These results are consistent with the idea that the use of committee power reduces the need for direct intervention or engagement by all political actors invested in the success of the committee member. We do not find evidence of changes in interactions with groups least connected to national politicians, the local government chairmen (Column 5; -0.14 percentage points) and community groups (Column 6; -0.35 percentage points). To assuage concerns around the use of multiple dependent variables, a joint test of significance across all of the variables relating to legislative involvement in the bureaucracy has a p-value of 0.00. The results suggest that committee membership is impacting the political environment of the bureaucratic implementation of public projects.

On the executive side, intervention increases, particularly by the Governor (Column 8; 1.17 percentage points) and State Commissioner (Column 9; 2.30 percentage points). The probability of their intervention in a project increases by 9% and 21% respectively. As one might expect, as a particular politician becomes more powerful within the state high-ranking bureaucrats within that state become eager to serve their interests. Federal bureaucrats continue to have substantial interactions with the corresponding central ministries. They report that 27 percent of projects are implemented with substantial intervention by the central ministry. Once again, a joint test of the executive variables has a p-value of 0.00, as does a joint test of all the variables in Table 5.

The results of Table 5 reflect the ‘general equilibrium effects’ of committee membership. By shifting the incentives of one of the most powerful elites in a polity, the actions of many other key political and bureaucratic elites are also shifted. Committee membership is reducing the need for any political engagement outside of the committee and increasing the incentive for executive engagement by bureaucratic actors.

In a range of settings, political pressure on bureaucrats has led to increased bureaucratic corruption (Pande, 2008). Using the public officials survey, we can build on the existing literature by investigating how increases in politician power lead to shifts in bureaucrats’ reports of pressures to undertake corrupt acts. Given that the political environment around implementation is shifting overall, it is unclear ex-ante what the direction of change would be. Less informal engagement may lead to lower corruption, but greater political power by the central political authority may lead to higher levels of corruption. For example, a natural question is whether politicians are using their formal powers to increase funding for political campaigns.

To elicit information on perceptions of corruption, I asked bureaucrats on what proportion of recent projects that the official had worked on did they observe ‘others breaking service rules for their own benefit’. On average, officials stated that on 38% of projects such observations of corrupt practice had been made. We aggregate this to the organization level to construct the proportion of projects bureaucrats report having observed corrupt practices on. Column 1 of Table 6 presents a variation of equation (3) in which the dependent variable is this proxy of organization-level corruption. We see that formal power increases the likelihood of observed corruption in the implementing organization by 1.36 percentage points, or 4%.

I also asked whether officials had themselves been put under pressure to: (i) change the project location; 19