budget than a non-member.<sup>7</sup> Committee members can threaten reductions in funding to organizations they believe are uncooperative, issue complaints about individuals or organizations to the Presidency or other influential members of the bureaucracy or generally cause reputational damage, and limit progress in other areas of bureaucratic interest such as sector policy development. While there is a complex congressional bargaining game that defines the broad features of government productivity, committee members have formal powers to influence how projects are implemented.<sup>8</sup> To what extent do we find evidence of these powers being used to differentially affect the fate of projects in the constituencies of committee members? A simple answer to this would be gained by comparing projects implemented under members and non-members. A concern with this direct comparison is that the implementation environment of projects would not be alike, since politicians from constituencies with particular (potentially unobservable) characteristics may find their way onto committees relevant to their present political needs.

To ameliorate this concern, I use the observation that roughly half of committee members are selected due to pre-existing sectoral qualifications and experience. The argument that underlies the identification strategy of this paper is that the decision as to which sector a politician specialized into early in life is unrelated to the implementation environment of a public project in their constituency today, apart from through their influence on the committee. Specifically, when I compare the implementation of projects for which the corresponding representative is on the appropriate committee, I instrument for membership using individual relevant sectoral experience. The coefficient of interest is then the impact of committee membership on project implementation for those politicians selected for their expertise rather than for political reasons.

How members of the sectoral standing committees are selected is thus an important element of my identification strategy. To understand the process in the Nigerian context, I gathered information from the rules governing the House, from academic and committee secretary assessments of committee composition, and from newspaper reports. The Standing Orders of the House of Representatives states that the ‘Committee on Selection’ is the single authority for the determination of committee composition. The Committee on Selection states that it weighs up macro-political factors, made up of a need to represent geo-political zones and parties in proportion with their size in the Congress, and a guiding principle that members should be allocated to sectors in which they have relevant qualifications or experience. This implies that politicians who qualified as doctors are placed on the health committee, educationalists on the education committee, and so on. As the Speaker of the House has confirmed in the House Hansard, “In the composition of Membership and Leadership of Committees, special attention will be paid to the skills and relevant experiences of Members in order to achieve greater efficiency” (House Hansard, 2011).

Committee members do not have specific expertise in the implementation of public sector infrastructure projects. For example, doctors are unlikely to have experience building physical health centers. However, their broad sector experience is a mechanism for sorting politicians across committees. Note that the median (and mean) number of sectoral committees that a politicians is on is 1. While politics certainly plays a role in committee selection, I present evidence in section 4.1 that demonstrates that the rules related to sector-experience are being followed for a sub-set of members.<sup>9</sup> Of those individuals who have

> 7The significant power of standing committees has long been recognized for the US Congress. Woodrow Wilson asserted that committees dominate congressional decision making, stating that "we are ruled by a score and a half of ‘little legislatures’" (Wilson, 1887). Richard Fenno, in his magisterial book on committees in congress, states that committee decisions are usually accepted and ratified by the other members of the chamber, giving members of a committee significant influence over the sector they represent (Fenno, 1968). Shepsle and Weingast (1987) and Krehbiel et al. (1987) elaborate theories of why the congressional committees are so powerful.

> 8House of Representatives (2007), the House Standing Orders, provides further information on the role of standing committees in Nigeria’s Parliament and the scope of activity of their members.

> 9More discussion on the process used by the Committee on Selection to select committee members is provided in the Appendix.

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