appropriate biography of the individual. In such cases, I took the most conservative approach and coded that individual as having no relevant experience.

I then used education regulations from Nigeria’s education sector to define years of education variables from the collection of qualifications that each representative had earned. For the very small number of representatives for which educational qualifications were not available, I replaced their years of education with the mean of all other representatives and include a dummy indicating that years of education is missing in all specifications that include representative years of education.

# **A.3 Process of defining committee membership**

The Selection Committee of the House of Representatives selects those politicians they deem fit to be members of the standing committees. Section XVII of the House Standing Orders states that, “There shall be a Committee to be known as the Committee on Selection appointed at the commencement of every Assembly ... The Committee’s jurisdiction shall cover nominating Members to serve on Standing and Special Committees” among other duties.

The Selection Committee is required to select committee members such that each committee is representative of Nigeria in terms of its six geo-political regions (North Central, North East, North West, South East, South South, South Central) and the strength of the parties in the House. For example, Order XIV of the House Standing Orders states, “Members of Committees shall be nominated by the various political parties and appointed by the Committee on Selection in accordance with their strength in the House.” The Selection Committee has a guiding principle to match representative’s qualifications with the committees on which they sit. For example, the vice chairman of the Committee on Selection states, as reported in This Day newspaper, “The Selection Committee ... considered cognate experience, areas of specialization and zonal representation in order to ensure that the chairman and vice chairman of a committee do not come from the same geopolitical zone.” (This Day, 2007).

For each committee, the House Standing Orders outline the list of topics to which the House delegates oversight responsibility. For example, the Health Committee’s jurisdiction covers specialist hospitals, teaching hospitals, medical research, federal medical centers, and a host of other topics including ‘health matters generally’. The Selection Committee therefore determine, for each committee, those members who have relevant qualifications to provide appropriate oversight of the sector. They then choose individuals from this set within each geo-political zone, and within the appropriate proportions of the relative weights of the parties in the House.

Since I have only coded the committees relevant to the social sectors, I observe some politicians sitting on no committees. They are likely to sit on a committee outside of the social sectors. Some representatives serve on multiple committees, and the maximum number of committees a representative sits on is 4. To understand how this reconciles with the need for sectoral knowledge, some politicians have qualifications/experience in multiple sectors. For example, they may be a qualified doctor who is a professor of medicine at a university. This individual would likely serve on both the health and education committees. Where there are small changes to the committees over time, I use the membership relevant to the 2006 and 2007 budgets.

As was seen in section 4.1 of the main text, there is strong evidence that the Selection Committee does this based on the three factors of geo-political and party representation and relevant qualifications and experience. In a number of fora, members of the Selection Committee have stated that once they must 25