campaign for political office, I once again include sector fixed effects to absorb any impacts of sector on re-election rates.<sup>31</sup> Column 2 of Table 7 indicates that membership increases the probability of winning the next election by 15 percentage points, with a corresponding p-value of 0.02. The difference is similar to the OLS result, indicating that the impact on re-election of project implementation is similar across committee members. On a baseline probability of electoral success of 0.61, committee membership bestows a 25% increase in the probability of success. Column 3 indicates that clustering at the federal constituency level, the coefficient is significant at the 10% level. Together with the results in previous tables, it would seem that committee membership enables representatives to manipulate bureaucratic implementation of public projects for electoral gain. The results in this paper imply that there is a two-pronged strategy for improved electoral success - both increase the visibility of project delivery in a constituency, as well as siphon off funds to selected contractors for campaigning. That the reduction in quality does not counteract the increased level of provision could indicate that citizens are satisfied with increased project implementation at lower quality or that they are compensated outside of the formal system of government. Such an interpretation would be consistent with Olken’s (2007) finding that community satisfaction with public goods is not significantly determined by the quality of those goods.

The scale of the coefficient in Column 2 of Table 7 is almost equal in magnitude to estimates of the incumbency advantage in the US (Ansolabehere et al., 2007). The consistency between these estimates implies that legislators in the Nigerian setting use their influence over projects through committee membership as a means of supporting their re-election in the same way that members of the US Congress influence congressional activities (including pork-barrel projects). In both cases, politicians are using the institutions of incumbency to signal their value to voters, or potentially for using those institutions for broader electioneering activities. This is consistent with evidence from the first century of the United States (Gordon and Simpson, 2018), which indicates that local infrastructure improvements such as those discussed in this paper became politically strategic once politicians were required to indicate their individual worth beyond their ideological outlook.

# **5 Discussion and conclusions**

This paper provides evidence on the mechanisms through which politicians interfere in bureaucratic processes related to the delivery of public projects and the corresponding trade-offs of political oversight. It establishes the extent to which politicians influence the productivity of the bureaucracy by using the formal powers gifted to them by membership of a legislative committee. Using data from across the Federal Government of Nigeria, I find that committee membership increases project initiation and progress, but has weaker impacts on completion, and reduces quality. These findings provide some of the most detailed empirical evidence to date on the consequences of political interference in the bureaucracy, assessing both quantity and quality, as well as where in the project cycle political influence is having the most significant impact.

A growing literature identifies the impacts of political engagement with the bureaucracy on government performance (Grindle, 2012; Iyer and Mani, 2012; Nath, 2014; Gulzar and Pasquale, 2017). The mechanisms through which politicians are able to affect bureaucratic implementation have largely remained a puzzle, and this paper provides micro-empirical evidence on the nature of these mechanisms. Using

> 31An alternative way to respond to this concern is to include sector of experience of constituency politician fixed effects. This alternative specification strengthens the results reported in Table 7.

21