copies of its Strategic Implementation Framework for the sustenance of gender equality perspective in all sectors’. This project requires international-level technical assistance, inputs from multiple sectors, and national-level engagement with international donors and Nigerian stakeholders. Such a project’s benefits cannot be attributed to a single constituency, but rather benefits the nation as a whole. On the other hand, the benefits of a borehole to be provided in a specific constituency in Borno state can clearly be assigned to citizens of that constituency.

# **A.2 Politician characteristics**

To effectively characterize the politicians studied in this paper, I constructed biographies of each of the 360 representatives in the 5th (2003-7) National Assembly. I undertook the following process. I drew the list of winning politicians from the Independent National Electoral Commission’s ‘Compendium of Results of the 2003 General Elections: Vol.1: Presidential and National Assembly Elections’. Where there were electoral tribunals, I followed the judicial process for each and noted where there was a change of representative and the date on which the successful petitioner took up office. I also used National Assembly website records to identify any deaths among the congresspersons. This defined a complete set of representatives relevant to the 2006 and 2007 budget processes.

For each politician, I then hand-coded basic demographic information (sex, age and education) from the National Assembly’s ‘Nigeria Legislature 1861-2011: Compendium of Members and Officials’. In the very small number of places where age was missing, I either confirmed this using other sources or replaced their age with the mean of all representatives and include a dummy indicating that age was missing in all specifications that include representative age.

I then built up a profile of the career of each representative and coded their relevant experience into the sectors of the standing committees in the data. Only substantive experience in a sector over a sustained period of time was counted as relevant experience. To give a brief overview of how I sorted candidates into sectors, those with a training in finance or who had been a financial officer at a large private firm or public organization were coded as having experience in finance. Doctors or other health professionals such as nurses, pharmacists, or affiliates of medical institutions were coded as having experience in health. Electrical or other relevant engineers and those involved in contracting power facilities were coded as having experience in the power sector. Mechanical engineers or those with experience in river basins management were coded as having experience in the water sector. Farmers and those involved in the agro-processing industry were coded as having experience in the agriculture sector. Women and those who have engaged with gender-focused organizations were coded as having experience in the women’s sector. Civil engineers or those with experience in building large-scale urban infrastructure were coded as having experience relevant to to the Committee on the Federal Capital Territory. Anyone who had qualifications in environmental management or worked for an organization with experience implementing environmental projects was coded as having experience relevant to the environment sector. Architects and those involved in small-scale urban development projects were coded as having experience in the housing sector.

The information for the biographies came first from the National Assembly website, and where relevant from the publication, ‘Nigeria’s 4th Republic Handbook 1999-2003’. Where these did not yield sufficient detail, a comprehensive search of the AllAfrica archive of all newspaper articles from major Nigerian newspapers was used to collect biographical information. Finally, when this was insufficient, simple Google searches yielded biographical details. In roughly 15 percent of cases this did not yield an 24