relevant committee experience, 68 percent are selected on to the relevant committee. This rule therefore grants influence over projects to politicians who may have limited expertise to monitor them.

Once on a legislative committee, politicians can pressure bureaucrats working on projects in their constituency through the formal committee review process. This may be in the design of the budget or in its implementation. Legislative committees meet with senior members of sector organizations on a regular basis to assess project progress as well as monitor other aspects of sectoral business such as policy development.

Politicians can separately choose whether to interact informally with bureaucrats at an organization, for example by contacting them outside of formal channels, either personally or through an advocate, and provide them with informal incentives. In roughly a quarter of the projects we study, politicians are reported by bureaucrats in the corresponding implementing organizations to intervene in some way in project execution, and in 14 percent of projects, politicians personally engage with public officials. In the survey of public officials undertaken for this work, public officials state that political interference in their work is significant, and incentives are both positive (such as elicit transfers) and negative (such as coercion). Becoming a member of a committee provides a politician with a formal route to influence project implementation in her constituency. This may reduce the necessity to personally engage bureaucrats, and we see evidence for committee membership leading to a general shift in the equilibrium levels of political engagement of the bureaucracy. As we shall see, the exogenous increase in power leads to a wider shift in the committee member’s political strategy.

# **3 Data**

To assess the consequences of political interference in the bureaucracy in the Nigerian public sector, I require data from across government. I have assembled a data set that combines characteristics of politicians with their positions in the National Assembly. Based on a representative sample of projects from the Federal Government of Nigeria’s 2006 and 2007 budgets, I have details of the projects that these politicians oversee in each of their sectors, surveys of the organizations that implement these projects, and evaluations of how effectively they do so. Overall, I have a detailed profile of the delivery of public projects from initiation to implementation.

In this section I describe the core explanatory variables that relate to politicians, their constituencies, the characteristics of projects that are implemented in those constituencies, and the bureaucratic organizations which implement them.

## **3.1 Politicians and Their Qualifications**

A politician in this paper is a Nigerian House of Representatives member. Nigeria’s 5th National Assembly was inaugurated in May 2003, and consisted of 109 senators and 360 representatives. My focus will be on the House of Representatives because of the significance of standing committees and public projects in that chamber relative to the Senate.<sup>10</sup> The data used here covers 350 of the 360 constituencies, with

> 10Richard Fenno’s famous 1973 study comparing the US Senate and House argued strongly that decision making inside the Senate is much less of a committee-dominated process than in the House. “In the House,” Fenno writes, “the individual member’s influence on chamber decisions is exerted, almost wholly, within and through his committees. Senators operate with no such constraints.” A corollary of this is important for the current exercise. Fenno continues, “That is, a Senator’s committee membership adds far less to his total potential for influence inside his chamber than a Representative’s committee membership adds to his potential for influence in his chamber.”

7