poverty, access to existing public projects and local economic dynamics. These will be used as controls in the core specifications and are described in detail in the Appendix.

Panel A of Table 1 describes the constituencies under study. Nigeria’s citizens are generally poor, with a high proportion of the population in extreme or relative poverty. The average years of education is five years, equivalent to less than primary school completion. Only 48 percent of Nigerians have potable water, and the average number of hours of electricity available per day is 4.5. There are plenty of opportunities for public projects to have significant welfare impacts across these constituencies, and for those projects to be electorally advantageous.

From the set of 360 politicians voted into power in 2003, the Committee on Selection chose 216 members for the 8 standing committees that cover the representative set of public projects on which I have independent evaluation data. For each of the relevant committees of the 5th National Assembly, I coded the membership of the committee using data from Nigerian Congress, a website that provided details of all the House Committees set up in 2003. I also gained information on membership for the relevant period from secretaries of the appropriate committees. The committees I study are agriculture, education, environment, Federal Capital Territory (city building), health, housing, water, and women and youth. I then matched each representative to the committee membership records, and noted their position as member, chair, or vice-chair.<sup>15</sup> The mean and median number of committees under study that a representative sits on is one. We now turn to those projects that the committees made decisions over.

# **3.2 Public projects**

In 2006 and 2007, the 5th National Assembly legislated a Federal Budget of US$12.7 billion and US$15.1 billion respectively, or US$27.8 billion in total over the two years. The focus in this paper is social sector capital projects, which account for roughly 35 percent of the total, or 73 percent of capital expenditures.

In both of these years, Nigeria’s Presidency undertook a unique monitoring and evaluation initiative that tracked the implementation of a representative sample of social sector projects. The ‘Overview of Public Expenditure in NEEDS’ (OPEN) monitoring initiative arose out of Nigeria’s receipt of debt relief in 2005. As a result of sweeping reforms across major organs of government (for an overview see Nkonjo-Iweala and Osafo-Kwaako, 2007), Nigeria received cancellation of its external debt to the tune of US$18 billion from the Paris Club. At the federal level, the annual savings from debt interest were channeled into the social sectors (health, education, water etc.) that are the focus here. The Presidency viewed this as an opportunity to track the effectiveness of government expenditures, and so in 2006 and 2007 the Nigerian Government traced, at a project level, the use and impact of 10 percent of all Federal Government social sector expenditures.

The OPEN projects were designed to be a representative set of government social sector expenditures, providing me with data on a representative sub-set of the federal social sector budget.<sup>16</sup> Since I am investigating constituency politics, I am only interested in those projects whose benefits can be directly

> 15The US literature on standing committees I take as a guide for this study (Aghion et al. (2005, 2009, 2010) and Cohen et al. (2011)) conditions quantitative regression specifications on the ‘grade’ of the standing committee. Congressional committees are typically seen as having a hierarchy of importance, and the grade of the committee reflects the standing of the committee within that hierarchy. The rationale for following this practice is that in politically important committees, the dynamics of delegation may be distinct from other committees. I follow this practice by including a binary indicator of the grade of the committee under which the project falls in all specifications. This is a dummy that takes the value 1 if the committee is perceived to be of high political weight or 0 otherwise. I follow Ojeifo’s (2007) delineation of grade A (agriculture, water, education, housing, environment, Federal Capital Territory) and grade B (health and women and youth) committees. The core results are all qualitatively the same when I do not include this variable.

> 16In the survey of bureaucrats I use in this paper, I was not able to undertake a survey at the decentralized organization to which electrification projects can be delegated. I therefore have to exclude all electrification projects for this analysis.

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